Trollheart's Album Discography Reviews: Genesis
 

Note: In these threads I will also be covering any solo projects or other bands artists may have been in. As all of these guys have their own solo work, expect to see their material featured at some point too.

All right, I obviously enjoy all of the artists I'm making threads here for and whose discographies I'm featuring, but this one holds a lot of personal significance for me, as this was the first band whose records I ever collected, and the one that got me into progressive rock. A byword for some for boring, lazy and predictable music - and that is sometimes hard to deny after the mid-eighties, in fairness - but for others an iconic band who pushed the boundaries almost before those boundaries were there, who developed a reputation for intricate, complicated and interesting music and for elaborate lightshows, who would be among the first to use multimedia, and who in the seventies were in the forefront of the new movement sweeping music as progressive rock was born.

Though I constantly get sneered at for liking them, the band recorded what I believe to be some of the most important albums in the genre, and many of their contemporaries today owe a debt of gratitude to them. Sure, they sort of imploded under the weight of their own self-importance and a partial betrayal of their principles near the end, but they remain my favourite band ever. So without further ado, let me introduce you to the music of Genesis.

As anyone who knows anything about the other two artists I've started threads on will realise, these discogs are not going to be in any order whatever; while I originally wrote some of them that way (including this one) I don't really want to retread that idea, and it can be a little boring. So instead I'm going to kick this off with what struggles with another of two of their albums as my favourite from the band, and often comes out on top. All the more amazing when you realise they released two in the same year, and yes, that other one is one of its rivals for the top spot

Wind and Wuthering (1976)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...dwuthering.jpg

For me, this album has it all. Long, epic prog masterpieces, sumptuous ballads and gorgeous and provocative instrumentals; Banks at his best and Steve Hackett still with them, his swansong before departing the band for a solo career. Collins had only taken the helm that year with the previous A Trick of the Tail, which was the second album released by Genesis in 1976 and the first without longtime member and founder Peter Gabriel, and was settling well into his role. Phil Collins was actually the first vocalist I heard with Genesis, as my original introduction to them was via the double-live Seconds Out, with him on vocals, as related in the very first entry in this journal, almost a year ago now. So unlike others I had no real knowledge of the much different voice of Peter Gabriel, and was without their dislike for “the new guy”.

This is not to say that I prefer Collins, or that I undervalue the massive contribution Gabriel made to the band, but like the Fish vs Hogarth debate in Marillion over a decade later, I find I don't like one or the other: I like both, and each brings his own special set of skills and his own touch to the particular period he is associated with. Gabriel does great on songs like “Visions of Angels”, “Watcher of the Skies” and “The Musical Box”, but I actually prefer Collins' vocal on “Supper's Ready”, which was originally a Gabriel vehicle. Possibly the fact that two of my favourite Genesis albums turn out to be this and A Trick of the Tail could say something, but then I love The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Trespass, as well as Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme, though funnily perhaps I don't agree with the conclusion come to by the readers of Classic Rock presents Prog recently, when they voted their favourite Genesis album of all time to be Selling England by the Pound. So what does that say?

Well, the debate can go on and on, but for myself I'm happy to say that I appreciate both singers, in both their periods, and don't prefer one over the other. This though was one of the first studio Genesis albums I heard. I recall that for my birthday (don't ask me what age I was, though I was in school still so probably 15 or 16) I asked for A Trick of the Tail and Discovery (by ELO) as well as Paris by Supertramp as presents. My brother already had this album, so I had no need to buy it when I could just borrow, tape and listen to it. But it made a massive impression on me, almost as much as A Trick of the Tail did.

It's an album I hardly need to listen to in order to be able to review it, I know it so well, but sometimes when listening for review purposes I've discovered things on other albums which I hadn't previously noticed, so I'm spinning it as I write. It opens on “Eleventh Earl of Mar”, and it's obvious from the off that it's a keyboard-centric album, with as I mentioned somewhere else, possibly on someone else's journal, some of Tony Banks' very best work. This is probably borne out as he has cited it as one of his favourite albums. It's a heavy, synthy opening which quickly morphs into a bouncy, uptempo number with Phil Collins' vocals somehow fitting the material perfectly. Great Hammond organ work in particular from Tony, and some excellent guitar work from Steve Hackett.

Halfway through it slows down with an acoustic guitar bridge played by Hackett, very pastoral and with a gentle vocal from Collins, spacey keyboards keeping an ethereal backdrop until the song pulses back into life for the finale, with pretty thunderous drumming from our man Phil, the song finishing as it began on loud, expressive Hammond. The longest track by a long way, “One For the Vine” is next, loosely based on the experiences of a messiah-like figure, obvious comparisons to Christ come up. It starts on a squeaky keyboard intro which then slides into a rather beautiful piano piece by Tony Banks as the song rolls along gently, Collins introducing the “hero”, who has deserted the messiah he was following, as the man leads his people into battle. Straying off ”The path prepared for him/ Onto a wilderness of ice” he finds himself in a faraway place. Completely against his intentions he is mistaken by the people living here for that which he has just rejected, a saviour, and he ends up leading these people into another horrible battle.

As fervour catches in him, he declares he will save these people and the song gets faster and more frenetic, with powerful keys and heavy drumming, until he realises he is becoming that which he left behind, the messiah he lost faith in and escaped. He retreats to a lonely place to meditate, this being conveyed by another beautiful piano piece from Banks, with attendant synth. This then turns into a fast, uptempo, almost frantic showcase for Collins on the drumkit as the song pounds back into life, great bass work from Mike Rutherford and much more uptempo piano and keys from Tony, some sharp guitar from Hackett. Realising he can't let “his people” down, the man returns to take his place at the head of their army, and we move into another slow synth and piano piece similar to the one that opened the song. As it comes to a close, one of his followers strays off the path, and disappears, and the “saviour” sees this, realising that the whole thing is about to repeat itself; in fact, it's left open as to whether this is the “original” saviour he had been following, going “back” to “his” world, or whether it's a vision of himself. A powerful and epic song, it ends strongly and has become one of Genesis' standards. The piano line it ends on is the one it began on, as everything - story, song, music - come full circle.

“One For the Vine” is a Tony Banks composition, and it's really one of his masterpieces. Against that, Mike Rutherford's gentle ballad “Your Own Special Way” is a little mundane, but it's nice, with of course plenty of guitar, restrained and relaxed, soft keyboard lines and a gentle vocal from Collins. Not surprisingly, it was released as a single, and did well, especially in the USA, in some ways I guess introducing the band to America for the first time. It's followed by “Wot Gorilla?”, one of the few instrumentals Genesis recorded in their almost thirty-year career. It's a fast, cheerful uptempo piece driven by wailing keyboards and some fine drumming by Collins. In ways, it kind of foreshadows elements of the melodies that would be prevalent on Duke, which would not be released for another four years.

The somewhat irreverent, fun theme continues then in another Tony Banks composition, the wonderful “All In a Mouse's Night”, which tells of the adventures of a mouse as he searches the house for cheese, gets chased by a cat and is saved by fate. The song is more or less broken into three parts, the first called “The Lovers' Story” concerns two people making love and disturbed by a mouse. Almost out the door of the bedroom, the mouse is discovered by the wife/girlfriend who screams and exhorts her husband/boyfriend to get rid of it. As the door is opened the mouse escapes and has the run of the house. The music is sort of fast-waltzy, mostly keyboard based as Collins moves into the second part of the song, “The Mouse's Story”, where the mouse is accosted by a cat, who tries to kill him but knocks a vase down on his head, and so the mouse escapes. Left to explain this to his compatriots, the cat invents a story of a ten-foot mouse ”With teeth and claws to match!” in “The Cat's Story”, so as not to let it be known he was outsmarted by a mouse. The final part, the cat's story, is led by heavy Hammond organ, with a great outro on keys and guitar. Great song, and great fun.

But the fun ends there, as “Blood On the Rooftops” is an acoustic led ballad decrying the loss of identity and self to the goggle box, with such shows as The Streets of San Francisco and The Wednesday Play namechecked, as the singer, an old man tells his young visitor it was ”Better in my day/ When we got bored/ We'd have a world war/ Happy but poor” and declares that he finds ”Arabs and Jews/ Too much for me”. There's a lovely acoustic guitar opening by Steve Hackett, to rival his star turn in “Horizons” on Foxtrot in 1972, and a gorgeous little piece on autoharp. The song gets heavier about halfway in, as the old man's frustration boils over and he snaps ”The rain at Lord's stopped play/ Seems Helen of Troy/ Has found a new face again.”

Two instrumentals then, well, one really but broken into two parts, reference the second part of the album's title, taken from the Emily Bronte classics. “Unquiet Slumbers For the Sleepers...” is the first part, carried on whistling keys and light guitar with almost no percussion, just a few drumrolls following the tune and ushering in the second part “... In That Quiet Earth”, much more uptempo and again quite Duke-ish, with heavier guitar and mellotron, Collins' drums coming much more to the fore now, with what sounds like some backwards masking on some of the synth parts. It breaks into a heavier, rock-almost-reggae beat as it enters the last minute, Hackett and Rutherford breaking out the electric guitars and going at it, Banks keeping the main melody going on the keys. It speeds up just at the end, and segues directly into the closer.

A staple at just about every Genesis concert, “Afterglow” is a great finale to a great album. A slow, measured ballad carried on a jangly guitar line and ending on a droning keyboard melody, it's a powerful vehicle for Collins' voice, with great choral vocals which I believe are made on a Moog synth. It ends on a long instrumental part on the Moog which fades out the track, and closes the album.

They definitely don't make them like this any more. Wind and Wuthering is important to the Genesis canon for many reasons, some already mentioned. It was the last album to feature Steve Hackett, and the one on which Phil Collins really came of age as a vocalist and frontman. It gave them their first minor US hit single, and it features more instrumentals than any other Genesis album before or since. It also features one of their longest tracks; at ten minutes long it's only beaten by a handful of other tracks down the years, (other than the seminal "Supper's Ready", of course) and it's only the second album to feature solo compositions from the band, with three songs written by Tony and one by Mike: by this I mean the one person wrote both lyric and music. Mike did write other songs on the album but only the lyric; he collaborated with Steve and Tony on the music.

This was one of the albums which, along with Seconds Out and A Trick of the Tail, started off my love affair with Genesis, and so it's definitely worthy of the slot here. It was also the only other place I ever heard the word wuthering, outside of the novel. It has two messiahs for the price of one, a song about TV and a cat being beaten by a mouse! What more could you ask for, really?

TRACK LISTING

1. Eleventh Earl of Mar
2. One For the Vine
3. Your own special way
4. Wot Gorilla?
5. All in a Mouse's Night
6. Blood On the Rooftops
7. Unquiet Slumbers For the Sleepers...
8. … In That Quiet Earth
9. Afterglow

Rating: 9.8/10

What can I add? Very little, except to say that when you consider the totality of their catalogue, Genesis are probably my favourite band of all time. They have done albums I don't like, but that run of albums from Trespass through to ...And then There Were Three is spectacular.

Interesting that you pick this album to start with, because most of the fans seem to prefer its sibling, A Trick of the Tail. Personally I think they are neck and neck, and I think they would have worked well as a double album.

Re the Gabriel vs Collins thing: my take on this is that Collins was technically a better singer, but Gabriel's voice and delivery was better suited to the material on the albums where he was the vocalist - hardly surprising, since he was the main man behind the lyrics.

P.S. I love "Afterglow". One thing Banks is very good at is songs that close an album well. This is simpler than many of his compositions - only a relatively small number of chords, but some quite unorthodox chords and chord progressions, as we have learned to expect from Banks. You could almost call this a torch song. Another in this style is "The Final Curtain", from Tony's solo album Still; that one may be my favourite "finale" song ever, and if Tony ever did a concert of his own I would want that song to be the closing song of the night.

You'll find I don't give a rat's ass for what "the fans think", as evidenced in my disagreement with the majority that SEBTP is the best Genesis album. Not even close, in my view. I mean, "The Battle of ****ing Epping Forest"? Come on. But I began with W&W because it is MY favourite, or one of three that sort of interchange over the years.

I do like TOTT but I see it as another step along the road to throwing off their prog roots. Look at it this way (this is an analogy I was working on while making my dinner today): If you think of the band as a Roman legion coming back from the war, and after The Lamb they're a little disoriented. Their leader has left, and they're confused by the message he left in the album. They're blundering about lost in the woods. Mike spies a path, beckons the guys down to the river. It's, of course, the Rubicon. He says "Lads we can cross here!" but the boys are suspicious. "Those are the treacherous waters of pop," warns Tony, and Steve agrees. Phil though is more sanguine and says "Sure what can it hurt to try?" They urge their horses in. This is of course the time of Tric of the Tail. After sampling the pop waters they hurriedly exit, back to the bank they were on. "Didn't much like that," says Steve, and though Mike and Phil have a strange gleam in their eyes, both agree and they had back to the border of the woods.

Wind and Wuthering is recorded. All of them feel better, getting back to solid ground (prog rock) but Steve sees the look has not left the eyes of Phil and Mike, and he knows where they're bound: back across that river to the other side. He turns his horse into the woods. "I'm off," he says. "Anyone gonna join me?" Tony considers, but those woods are dark and deep, and he has promises, well, you know. So off Steve goes, never to be seen again (by the band).

And then, there were three.

Back to the edge of the water they go and then as one they plunge into the icy waters. In the struggle they lose most of their prog sensibilities, and the next album is born. Too far to turn back, they forge on ahead and Duke arrives. They try to hold on, throwing out a few prog bits here and there, but the roiling sea of pop has them now. Pulled under, Abacab results. Tony fights his way to the surface. Underwater, Mike has a dream about mechanics and Phil is already composing a top ten hit song - he knows that something is in the air tonight.

Tony kicks upwards, adds what prog influence he can to the album which is so lacking in originality now that they can't even be bothered to come up with a name and just use the band name. Hit singles are coming, they're known on the radio, people are looking at them in a new light. On the far bank, as all three surface, they can see the hordes of pop fans, beckoning them on while back on the shore they left, the prog fans mourn, trying to entice them back before it's too late.

But it is already too late.

Invisible Touch gives up the pretence of any sort of prog leanings and bursts them into the charts, while the pop fans cheer and wave them on. People who before this didn't even know who Genesis were are buying their records. People are buying the singles without any intention of buying the albums, without even knowing what album they're from. All three go under again. "We can't swim!" they cry, but it somehow comes out as "We can't dance!" and more hits are born. Finally, Phil gives up the ghost and sinks to the bottom of the river. Tony and Mike strike on, the latter thinking to himself "All I need is a miracle" while Tony thinks it's a curious feeling to be a two-piece.

As they reach shore, another swimmer struggles up. "Hi!" he gasps. "I'm Ray! Can I join you?" They nod. "Sure." But soon after all three sink, never to be heard from as a band again.

The pop fans wait, but when nobody surfaces, they stick their hands in their pockets and shuffle off to find the next new thing. With his last breath, Phil thinks angrily "they knew I was drowning, but they would not lend a hand."

The now calm surface of the river is broken by a few bubbles popping to the surface.

The rest, is silence.

^^ Something tells me Trollheart does not like the later albums much.

I like them fine. I think Genesis '83 has its moments (I love "Home by the Sea" and "Mama"), not a huge fan of Invisible Touch (again, the more proggy ones like "Domino" and to some extent "Tonight x3" but otherwise not really) and I have little time for Abacab generally, though I love Duke and I in fact find We Can't Dance a really good album, just not a really good prog one. Calling All Stations falls apart after the opening track for me and ends in a confused muddle where the guys don't seem to to know what the **** they're doing.

I just lament the total morphing of one of the premier classic prog bands into a pretty third-rate pop band, left to implode under the weight of its own bad decisions and torn apart by the twin forces of popularity and money, to say nothing of everyone looking to his own solo projects.

Other than that, I'm good with them.

I imagine Peter Gabriel regularly finds it hard not to bust a gut laughing.

Broadly speaking, I agree with your assessment of the later albums. The self-titled one is the only one of those that I have.

I consider We Can't Dance as one of their worst... but it does have Fading Lights so it's not a totally lost cause. It still amazes me how Phil gets those high notes.

Yes I personally feel "Fading Lights" would have been a perfect end song for the band to go out on. It has everything in the lyric, including the final word "remember". But then they went and spoiled it by getting Ray Wilson in. Nothing against the guy, but come on: take a totally non-prog vocalist (don't even try to tell me Stiltskin were prog!) for one album and then disband? The legacy was ruined. I actually think WCD is a decent album: I do like "Driving the Last Spike" and a few of the ballads - "Hold on My Heart", "Since I Lost You" and so on, and of course that closer. I'd have been happier if that had been the end of Genesis.

But from the end to (almost) the beginning, as we go back in time (screen warps and wobbles and goes black-and-white as my voice starts to shimmer and vibrate and echo....)

1971 saw some major changes for the band. Already having separated themselves from the vision, and control of Jonathan King, they now decided that drummer John Mayhew did not cut the muster and fired him. After some auditions they settled on a young guy called Phil Collins, and also added a second guitarist, mostly to replace the by now departed Anthony Phillips. His name was Steve Hackett. Expanding on their penchant for long, involved songs with different time signatures and esoteric lyrics, and helping in the process to lay down the blueprint for what would become the progressive rock of the 1970s, they released their third album in November of that year.

Nursery Cryme (1971)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...eryCryme71.jpg

Similar to the previous album, this one was based not so much on track numbers as lengths, with one more track than Trespass but its opening song already becoming their longest to date, at almost ten and a half minutes. It was pretty clear even at this early stage that Genesis were not writing albums with a view to releasing hit singles, though there are two shorter songs on this one. Even the album sleeve shows a determination to look back to the past, with a young girl in Victorian dress playing croquet with heads on a lawn, and yet there's a nod to the future (or at least, the present) as the young girl's nanny, who is coming out seemingly to stop her, appears to be on wheels. All of this is drawn from the opening track, “The Musical Box”, while yet retaining an air of a sort of twisted version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The opening song is as weird as they come, with the lyric “explained” in the inside cover of the album, and basically being the story of a homicidal young girl called Cynthia who kills her cousin, Henry. He then returns to her via a (supposedly) enchanted musical box, but when she opens it and it plays the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole”, Henry ages rapidly, and wishing to explore a lifetime's carnal desires in a single moment tries to rape Cynthia, before the nanny rushes in, throws the musical box at Henry and both disappear in a cloud of smoke. Yeah. This is the kind of thing you would come to expect from Genesis; their lyrics were seldom if ever rooted in the real world of real people, something which earned them labels such as “snobs”, “musical intelligentsia” and no doubt “pretentious bastards”, all of which pretty much has to be accepted.

While bands like Free were writing about wishing wells and their cousin Jake, and Sabbath were running from the devil, Steppenwolf were heading out on the highway and Marc Bolan was getting it on, Genesis became part of a sort of quasi-underground movement of bands who did not fit into the normal strictures of what was seen as rock music, and didn't want to. With stablemates like ELP, Yes and Pink Floyd, they would go on to explore different musical boundaries, break through them and create a whole new idea of what rock music could be. For a while, this new music, which would become known as progressive rock, would be the darling of the students, the educational elite, the hipsters of the day, and then at one point it would grow so big and bloated and self-important that it would just implode, and fall victim to the ravening jaws of punk rock.

But all of that was in the future, and even as they recorded this album Genesis could have had little inkling of how well their music would be received, how big they would get and how many people they would reach. Right now, they were just experimenting, flexing their musical muscles, seeing what they could do. Trespass had failed to gain any real interest, nor indeed would this album, but in Italy it would be an entirely different story, where, after a very successful tour to support it, Nursery Cryme would climb to the dizzy heights of number four in their charts.

But back to the music. “The Musical Box” opens with a strummed twelve-string guitar, played in an almost medieval manner, then the soft voice of Peter Gabriel comes in as he, in Henry's returning form, entreats Cynthia ”Play me “Old King Cole”/ That I may join with you.” The song again, somewhat like “Visions of Angels” on the previous release, seeks to not only distance the band from the notion of the Bible and God, but to actively deconstruct it. When Gabriel snarled ”I believe there never is an end/ God gave up this world/ Its people long ago” he was pretty much taking his first real potshots at the idea of a supreme deity, and here, in his role as Henry, now an old man, he snaps to Cynthia that ”The nurse will tell you lies/ Of a kingdom beyond the skies” but he has seen what lies beyond, and there's no Heaven, or even Hell. It's just a ”Half world” according to him, and he therefore wishes to dispel the young girl's foolish notions, put there by parents and guardians and nannies, of a reward, or even punishment, after death.

Gabriel's voice turns from soft and cajoling to bitter and angry in a moment, but the music remains gentle, carried on Steve Hackett's twelve-string, then Gabriel adds in some flute, the whole thing deceptively pastoral. It could almost be a tryst between lovers, which in a way it kind of is. IN the third minute the music becomes a little more intense, stately, grand, almost a musical declamation, but this fades away quickly as Henry again asks Cynthia ”Play me my song” at which point Tony Banks's newly-purchased Mellotron makes its voice heard, and with the addition of percussion from new guy Collins as well as a scorching solo from Mike Rutherford the tempo increases as things begin to spiral a little out of control. Whereas on Trespass there is little of what might be kindly called hard rock until the last track, the midsection here is a powerpunch in the face (for a Genesis album), then Gabriel recites the “King Cole” nursery rhyme, his voice dropping to almost a whisper as the music follows him down, deceiving the listener who relaxes just before a powerful aural assault takes us into another galloping instrumental which allows everyone to give vent to their talents, Collins hammering away at the kit, Banks trumpeting the keys and the two guitarists trading licks until finally it all stops suddenly as Gabriel takes us into the final section, a slow, yearning ode to love that, characteristically for this song, does not remain gentle for long, pounding up into a manic vocal with thundering drums and blaring keys, finally ending with Gabriel's desperate plea to Cynthia ”Why don't you touch me now?”, the whole thing finally ending on hammered mellotron chords, driving, wailing guitar and punching drums.

After that somewhat breathtaking introduction to this album, the next song is the shortest on it, and is a simple look at growing old, as two people visit a church to remember and perhaps say a prayer “For Absent Friends”, the first time Collins takes lead vocals. It's very pastoral, very folky and has echoes of “She's Leaving Home” in its melody. It's never been one of my favourites on the album to be honest, and owes more to the debut album than the second, but it's a nice opportunity to catch your breath after the epic opener, and not much of a breather, as the next one is eight minutes long and again shows the “heavier” side of Genesis, opening with a dancing, swirling keyboard run from Banks as “Return of the Giant Hogweed” relates the tale of a mysterious plant found in Russia and brought back to England during Victorian times. Honestly, I thought it was about John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids but it appears to be based on actual events. There are elements of “The Knife” and later “Watcher of the Skies”, as Banks seeks to make the Mellotron a signature sound for Genesis.

It proceeds mostly on a sort of marching beat, building to a frenetic crescendo, with a dangerous, warning and even frantic vocal from Gabriel as he warns ”Hurry now! We must protect ourselves/ And find some shelter!” The idea of an implacable enemy advancing is represented really well by the bass and the ticking drumbeats, and is something that thematically the band would return to almost a decade later on Duke. About halfway in, there's a powerful instrumental break which seems to presage the situation spiralling out of control as the Giant Hogweed threaten to take over the Earth. Even Gabriel's flute sounds somehow menacing. Then a rolling, rippling piano line from Banks almost offers some respite, a lonely guitar solo sounding a note of alarm as the tempo increases and things begin to build. This, again, has not ever been a favourite track of mine but you have to admire the way it's constructed, almost like a movie soundtrack. The wave breaks as the Hogweed prepare to attack and there's a big keyboard finish.

Apparently as I say this is based on real events, but I've never heard of such a thing happening. I could research it, but let's be honest: in all likelihood nobody's reading this review and if you are then I doubt you are bothered that much, so I'm not going to trouble myself. As is becoming the trend for at least this album, we have an epic piece of bombast followed by a more serene, gentle and simple tune. “Seven Stones” talks about prophecies, farmers, sailors and “the changes of no consequence”, but I have to be honest, I have no idea what it's about. Possibly the fallacy of putting faith in seers? Anyway, it's a nice soft tune driven on acoustic guitar and gentle keys, with some nice backing vocals, pretty much a vehicle for Banks to show his softer side after the manic intensity of “Return of the Giant Hogweed”. It has a nice chorus with quite the hook in it, and though there's not as much in it as either of the two epics, it's a song I do enjoy and return to from time to time. A fine vocal performance from Gabriel, who for once doesn't descend into his harder, rougher style, and adds some more of what is becoming his trademark flute passages.

There the pattern breaks, as the next two songs are both short, just under three minutes each, but “Harold the Barrel” reveals the playful side of Genesis, typified by the tale of a man who ”Cut off his toes/ And served them all for tea”! There's great humour in the song, and it cannons along at a loping pace, starting fast and only breaking down once for a rather beautiful little interlude where Harold, stuck on a ledge and about to jump, imagines himself ”Sailing in an open boat on the sea.” Something else that would come through later is a cast of characters, with people like Mister Plod the Policeman (really!), the BBC reporter, Harold's mother, the Lord Mayor and others all making an appearance, and all voiced by Collins. Real wisecracks like ”He can't last long/ Hasn't got a leg to stand on” and Harold's own advice to the policeman who tries to coax him off the ledge, ”Take a running jump!” help to pull the song along and it ends on a last descending piano chord from Banks, presumably indicating that poor Harold has taken his own advice. A soft ballad in a folky vein, reminiscent of the best of CSNY, “Harlequin” again has a lyric I don't understand, but it's not that necessary when it's driven by such a beautiful performance by Steve Hackett on the twelve-string and with sweet vocal harmonies, and it leads into the final epic, and one of my favourite Genesis songs.

Again, ploughing a path which would seem them alienated lyrically from other bands who concentrated on more “earthy” subjects, “The Fountain of Salmacis” is based on the ancient Greek myth of the nymph Salmacis who pursued the demigod Hermaphroditus, until she ended up merging with him and they became one being, hence the idea of hermaphrodites. You keeping up? Good. But lyrical matter aside, it's a beautiful song, which opens with a swirling, almost echoing keyboard that grows and falls back, grows and falls back, almost like the tide ebbing and flowing, that then gives way to Collins's workmanilke drums and Gabriel's vocal as he relates the story. The tempo picks up then as Hermaphroditus, pursuing a stag, finds himself chased by a lusty nymph. Again there are some great vocal effects, with Gabriel singing the main line and Collins (?) singing another one, as Marillion would later repeat on “Fugazi”.

The song runs for eight minutes, therefore making it the third epic on the album, and around the second minute that swirling, rising keyboard line returns to usher in the next verse. In the denouement, as the demigod shrinks back from the nymph and she refuses to be parted from him and calls on the gods to witness their union, Collins goes mad on the kit, with Banks setting up a real tarantella on the mellotron, driving home the danger and the urgency as Hermaphroditus tries to get away, unsuccessfully. A squealing guitar solo from Hackett underlines the struggle, then a vocal chorus witnesses the joining. Another long instrumental passage, somewhat in the mould of “Hogweed” before Banks takes control again with first the mellotron then a reprise of the keyboard intro to take the song into its final verse, the doom of the god and a sonorous organ brings everything to a close as Gabriel sighs ”Both had given everything they had” and they had, quite literally, each giving up their individuality to become one. A metaphor for marriage? Maybe. Don't ask me. All I know is there is a superb guitar solo to almost close the track, and the album out, before a rising organ and sussurating cymbals underline the final chapter in this tragedy, and with that final flourish the album comes to an end.

TRACK LISTING

The Musical Box
For Absent Friends
The Return of the Giant Hogweed
Seven Stones
Harold the Barrel
Harlequin
The Fountain of Salmacis

There's nobody, myself included, who could deny this album is self-indulgent, and on a grand scale. Not really until Yes began getting established, and ELP came on the scene, would rock see such excess both in terms of lyrical content and musical interpretation. None of these songs, like the previous album in fact, feature anything like a rock guitar solo, a verse/verse/chorus/verse structure; in fact, some of the songs don't even have choruses and in that way I suppose they're as close to jazz in terms of being freeform. The songs tend to look to teach rather than just repeat cliches, to open up a world of classical influences, including literature, theatre, philosophy and religion, and to make the listener actually think about the lyrics. It's a heavy album, but worth the slogging through I believe.

But if their newly won fans thought that was epic, they would be knocked sideways by what they would hear next.

Rating: 9.6/10

One little comment: I'm sure you're correct about the narrative of The Musical Box being completely from Peter Gabriel's fevered imagination. However there are quite a few Genesis songs whose story lines I initially assumed were just made up, but which I subsequently discovered were either based on fact (eg. "Hogweed"), or on pre-existing classical mythology (eg. "Salmacis").

The Giant Hogweed soujnds as fantastical as John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids", or the Martian invaders in H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", but the hogweed is a real plant, and a genuine menace, and the description in the song of how they were introduced to the British Isles is a fairly faithful telling of what actually happened.

If you ever come across one of these hogweed plants, DON'T touch it, and notify the relevant authorities - local council, Department of Agriculture, or whatever - immediately.

With typical lack of respect for chronology (I did this originally in order but this time I'm flying by the seat, as it were) we're now jumping from almost the beginning of their career to the last album released with Phil Collins, and still really kind of the one I consider the end of the entire story for Genesis.

After three relatively substandard albums that owed more to the world of pop than that of rock, particularly progressive rock, the three amigos came back with an album that almost - almost - took us back ten years, while yet retaining a modern sensibility about it. It was, very nearly, their version of So.
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We Can't Dance (1991)

You would almost think there was a joke hidden in there somewhere, when a band like Genesis, famed for long, complicated, adventurous progressive rock epics suddenly found their songs being played at discos and clubs, and attracting no doubt a younger and more female audience on the strength of their newer material. Whether or which, I don't know, but this album was their fifth consecutive number one in the UK, a top four placing in the USA, and though critics widely panned it, I consider it really the last truly great Genesis album. If there's a successor to A Trick of the Tail and Duke, then I believe this is it.

Again, they're looking more at real-world situations, with the opener, “No Son of Mine”, concerning the relationship between a man and his father, after the former leaves the family home, and how he finds it hard, even impossible to be accepted back. With a ticking drumbeat and a sort of growling synth, the song is a slow to mid-paced one, with a very honest vocal from Collins, even though it seems unlikely this is drawn from any of the band's actual experiences. Banks sets up the synth soundscape, building layer on layer until it all comes to a great crescendo for the chorus, the drums thumping hard and steady, like a judgement on the unhappy man of the title. It's a dark, bitter song, and the mood changes drastically then for “Jesus He Knows Me”, where the guys poke fun at TV evangelists, the tune uptempo and boppy, riding on a bubbling synth with lines like ”Just do as I say/ Don't do as I do” and ”You don't need to believe in the hereafter/ Just believe in me!” Of course, this is nothing new: Fish did the same thing on “Big Wedge” and The Hooters on “Satellite”, and no doubt there are many many others; the insincerity of these people is common fodder for rock and pop music, but Genesis do add their own little humorous slant here which makes the song something you can't help but like.

Again though, I hear the ghost of “Illegal Alien”, especially in the bridge, but I suppose you have to admire their courage, risking alienating a large section of their fanbase possibly. “Driving the Last Spike” looks at the courage of the men who built Britain's railways, and the conditions under which they worked. It's one of the two epics on the album, which oddly enough are almost exactly the same length, with only a difference of eight seconds between them. Running for just over ten minutes, this one opens with a reflective, lonely guitar from Rutherford, as Collins depicts the story of a man who is ”Leaving my family behind me/ Not knowing what lay ahead” and a sorrowful synth line underpins this necessary step into the unknown. Unlike the previous song, there's a great sense of sincerity and honesty running through this, and an attempt to honour these men, many possibly buried in unmarked graves, who worked and died to make Britain the mighty empire it became. The midsection features a powerful guitar solo and a warbling keyboard passage from Banks which brings it essentially into the second part of the song, as guitar drives it along, the tempo increasing slightly as the unnamed worker sighs ”There has to be a better life!”

There's definitely pride in being British, and respect paid to the men when Collins sings ”They'll never see the likes of us again!” That takes us to the title track, as such. It's actually called “I Can't Dance”, and is a kind of funky shuffle, very much driven on Rutherford's guitar, with some interesting percussion effects. It's a fun track but there's really nothing in it. Still won an award, though I think that was more for the video. The first of the fillers comes with “Never a Time”, which is basically every love song you've ever heard, and robs from the ending of “It's Gonna Get Better” from the Genesis album. This could be on a Collins solo album too and you wouldn't notice much difference.

We get back on track though with the excellent “Dreaming While You Sleep”, with its Gabrielesque drums, honking synth and creeping guitar. The story of a man tortured by having been involved in a hit-and-run, he finds he can't sleep and wonders how his victim is. There's a real sense of tension and drama building, mostly in the rather simplistic arrangement of the song. It bursts out on heavy pounding drumming and hard guitar as he tries to rationalise what he has done, and fails - ”All my life you'll lie silently there/ All my life, in a world so unfair/ And only I'll know why!” - hoping against hope that the woman in a coma will wake up. It's quite a selfish lyric really: the guy isn't so much bothered about the woman he ran down, so much as he is eaten alive by guilt, and if she were to wake up and survive then that guilt would, for him, be assuaged. Would he admit it was him? Sounds unlikely, as he talks about taking his secret to the grave.

“Tell Me Why” is another pointless little nod to the evils of the world without actually advancing any solution, almost as poor as his “Heat On the Street” from ... But Seriously. It's an okay pop song, with some nice parts, but ultimately it's empty. Phil rants about how heartless politicians are, but you know, some of that fortune, Phil, could be put to good use. This is why I have a problem with rich rock or pop stars crying their eyes out about poverty. If I had your money, I'd fucking do something to help! But no: we'll just write a song about it and let others sort it out. Sigh. This line really hits it on the head: ”You say there's nothing you can do/ One rule for them, one for you.” Indeed. I don't like “Living Forever” either. It has elements of 1983 Genesis about it, mixed in with some Duke-era stuff, and it's just a little confused. Every time I hear this song I forget what it's like, it just has that little effect on me. The backing vocals are drony and boring and there's a sort of nursery rhyme thrown in too for no good reason.

Luckily, the album rallies again at the end, with four fine tracks to close it out. The first, which I think is the first real ballad, is truly beautiful. “Hold On My Heart” has a tumbling drum intro and beautiful lush keys backing Phil's voice, which for once doesn't sound annoying to me. It's a simple song, but then so are the best ballads really. It's also one of caution, as Collins warns his heart to try to take things slowly --- ”Don't rush in this time/ Don't show her how you feel”. There's some lovely understated guitar work from Rutherford, which works really well, and the whole song is really well constructed. I could see this on Duke or ...And Then There Were Three..., though of course it does betray links with Collins's solo work. The next one has received a lot of bad press and criticism, and “Way of the World”, does, in fairness, take a very shrugged shoulders attitude to the injustices we live with every day, spreading the hands and saying “Sure what can you do?” But unlike “Tell Me Why”, which kind of treads the same lyrical territory, this is saved by its melody and beat, which you really can't help but tap your fingers to. It's like a kind of swing blues or something, rocking along in a midtempo vein. Lyrically it's pretty empty, but it gets a pass due to the melody, and I'm sure it went down well onstage. There's a kind of semi-reggae feel to it also, and since I don't care for reggae, the fact that I still really like this song says a lot. There's a great hook in the chorus, and I remember when I first played the album I began brightening up after the last few tracks, thinking maybe this is going to end well. I wasn't wrong.

I always thought “Since I Lost You” was a sad love song, but in fact it appears it's written by Phil Collins for Eric Clapton, in sympathy at the death of his young son which the singer/songwriter commemorated himself in his “Tears in Heaven”. It's a heartbreakingly open song, and Collins sings it with every ounce of emotion he can squeeze into his voice. It rides on a slow blues beat, Tony Banks's strong but supportive piano keeping the line as Collins sings ”It seems in a moment/ Your whole life can shatter” and asks the unanswerable question ”Oh how can life/ Ever be the same?” One of the sincerest songs of sympathy I've ever heard. I loved it before I knew the circumstances behind its lyric, and I love it even more now.

Whether Collins realised his time with Genesis was coming to an end, that he would soon leave the band and concentrate on his solo career and other adventures, I don't know, but the closing “Fading Lights” paints a sad but bittersweet picture of a man saying goodbye to his friends after so many good times. Every member of the band outdoes themselves here, and it's the other epic track, just over ten minutes again. When Collins sings ”Like a story that we wish was never ending/ We know sometime/ We must reach the final page/ Still we carry on just pretending/ That there'll always be/ One more day to go” it's touching, and it's perfectly executed. From the tiny taps of the drum machine which recall Phil's big success songs, to the impassioned keyboard solo from Tony Banks in the midsection that runs for so long it almost turns the song into an instrumental at the end, this is the perfect swansong for Genesis.

The vocal is quiet yet strong, wistful but determined, the voice of a man who really doesn't want to leave but knows he has reached that crossroad where he must make one of the hardest decisions of his life. When he sings ”We know that these are the days of our lives/ We will remember.” And if there are to be final memories of Genesis for Phil Collins, then this is probably the best they could fashion. It's well one of my favourites on the album, and pushes into the background the less than stellar tracks that blight the album. It's almost the Genesis of old meeting the Genesis of now in not so much an uneasy truce as a hearty handshake and a wry smile. The solo begins in the fourth minute and continues, more or less uninterrupted, through to the eighth, possibly Tony Banks's own personal farewell to his longtime friend and bandmate, while Mike Rutherford keeps up with him all the way, and Phil bashes out the drums, quite possibly with the hint of a tear in his eye.

And in the end, it fades away like its title, the final word left to the departing singer, with the last words of Phil Collins ever on a studio Genesis album, ”Remember...”

TRACK LISTING

No Son of Mine
Jesus He Knows Me
Driving the Last Spike
I Can't Dance
Never a Time
Dreaming While You Sleep
Tell Me Why
Living Forever
Hold On My Heart
Way of the World
Since I Lost You
Fading Lights

While it's certainly not the perfect Genesis album, I believe We Can't Dance is miles ahead of anything they had done since 1980, and would have been a fitting end for the band. Yes, there are duff tracks on it, but luckily the good ones are more than good enough to compensate for the few fillers. As a farewell to the fans, and to his bandmates, I don't think Phil Collins could have done better, and personally (though who am I to say?) I think they should have left it at that. However, they wanted to continue and so, for the second time in their forty-plus year career, Genesis went in search of a new vocalist. They found one, but he only lasted for the one album before Mike and Tony decided the magic wasn't really there anymore, and called it a day.

Note: The following was written as the ending of the original discography project, and is a little out of place here I know, but I really didn't want to cut it.

Since then, Collins has partially returned to Genesis, playing live with them on tours, but as yet rumours of a new album featuring the trio have not come to pass. Maybe they never will, and maybe it's better that way. As they say, and as Peter Gabriel seems to believe, you can't go back, and to try to recapture what you had ten, twenty, thirty years ago is like chasing a rainbow. So maybe they're better leaving well alone. If so, then this is where the Genesis story ends. It's been a long, at times rocky ride, starting out as a group of unsure teenagers writing music they didn't really want to write, to end up with a fully-blown rock opera which imploded the band and then set them on a course straight for superstardom.

Over the decades they helped give birth to progressive rock, made enemies and friends, explored whole new avenues of their talent, and for some, like me, created the soundtrack of their lives. For that, I will always be grateful to them. But rather than follow the words of “Please Don't Ask” and asking “Maybe we can try, maybe it would work this time”, I think it's best if the Lamb lies down for good this time, and let the three of them retire in peace and contentment to their homes by the sea.

Rating: 7.8/10

Perhaps appropriately, perhaps inevitably, this review has to be broken up into two parts, it's so long - overrunning the maximum character allowance for one post - and it stands as Genesis's first, and only, double studio album. It also remains to this day their most controversial and debated one, and provides the swan song for their leader and founder, main man, vocalist and principle lyricist, as he departs these shores, perhaps with a manic sense of satisfaction that he has left behind him a conundrum as impossible to unravel as the Gordian Knot.

There has been endless debate as to what this album's concept is about, and even its writer will not come clean, if he even knows. Very much the baby of Peter Gabriel, it was he who wrote all the lyrics, he who created the concept and he who kept extremely tight control over what would turn out to be the last Genesis album he would work on, the controversy over which rages even to this day among Genesis fans. In the seventies, concept albums were cool. Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull and David Bowie had all released concept albums, some of which had gone on to become classics. With their love of storytelling, their passion for long, epic, multi-part suites and their education in the classics, Genesis seemed the perfect band to follow, or even redefine, this practice.

But there's a problem. Most concept albums have a story or plot you can follow, or try to piece together. This one, frankly, still bewilders me. Which is not to say that it's not a great album, because it is, but when you write a concept, it's a good idea I feel to let the listeners and fans in on your thought processes, even a little. As far as I can see, Gabriel played his cards so close to his chest here that he virtually excluded his fanbase, and left a lot of people wondering what the hell was that all about?
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The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)

It's a rippling piano that opens the album with the title track, and you definitely get a sense of a movie or a theatre production as the music swells and bursts into the boppy melody, in which we're introduced to the protagonist, a Puerto Rican street punk who goes by the name of Rael (an anagram for real? Like just about everything about this album, I don't know but it's possible) as he emerges from some vandalism in the local subway - ”Rael, imperial aerosol kid/ Exits into daylight, spraygun hid” and witnesses the very odd phenomenon of a lamb appearing and lying down before him. On, you know, Broadway. This song rides on a hard guitar line from Steve Hackett but in the middle it falls to Banks to take the sprinkling, shimmering melody as Gabriel tries to put into words what Rael sees. With a group vocal singing ”On Broadway”, Gabriel purloins The Drifters' “On Broadway” for the ending of the song, and things, already a little weird, go completely off the rails.

“Fly On a Windshield” (the use of the Americanised word, whereas we would say windscreen, lending some credence to the fact that Genesis were trying to appeal to an American audience, but then after all, this does all take place in New York City so, you know, when in Rome. Or on Broadway...) comes in on a soft piano and choral vocals on the Pro Soloist with acoustic guitar, very ethereal and almost spiritual, as a cloud forms around Rael and moves towards him, he being apparently the only one who can see it, and filching from the midsection of “Harold the Barrel” Hackett softens the mood even more before hitting with an unexpected punch as the verse ends. A big, booming, driving drumbeat now takes the tune, stomping along as the cloud envelops Rael and crashing musically at least into the “Broadway Melody of 1974”. Still thumping along, there are many references to the old movie stars, like Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce and other figures of the time such as Howard Hughes and even the Ku Klux Klan. It's a confused and confusing song, deftly written yes, and I'm sure there's some sense in it but I can't make any out.

To be fair, the guy who writes the Wiki page for this album makes a good stab (whether correct or not I have no idea) at understanding/explaining it, and his take is that while Rael is enveloped in the mysterious cloud that only he can see, these images play out across the moviescreen-sized viewer in front of him. Hey, it's as good an explanation as any, and better than any I could come up with! A short, sweet and laidback guitar etude, presumably meant to represent Rael falling asleep, takes us then into “Cuckoo Cocoon”, where he awakes to find himself encased in a chrysalis, deep underground. A truly gorgeous piece of guitar from Hackett opens the song, a short one at only two minutes and change, but it runs then into one of the standouts on the album, “In the Cage”, where everything changes and the music takes on a much more manic, frenetic tone, semi-carnival with a real underlying element of horror. With a slow bassline resembling a heartbeat and swirling keys, its starts gently enough, but Banks's Mellotron soon begins the carnivale and dark voices issue from the Pro Soloist, as things begin to take shape. Trapped in his odd cage, Rael looks beyond its bars and sees others imprisoned like him, then beyond them, he catches sight of the figure of his brother, John. He entreats him to help him, but John just looks at him and runs away, leaving Rael to his fate.

The sense of panic woven by the music here is a credit to Genesis, who really create an almost claustrophobic atmosphere, with keyboard flurries by Banks almost taunting Rael with their power to run free and do as they please. As the music slows into a grand almost waltz, dark and doomy, Rael realises that the cage is dissolving, but he himself is now beginning to spin, as the music resumes the carnival tempo, fast, energetic, crazy, spiralling, spinning; unable to do anything, he staggers and faints. When he comes to, he finds himself in a factory, where he watches “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging”, human bodies being packaged up as product. This is I believe the first and possibly only time Genesis invited another performer onto their album, and here it is Brian Eno, whose weird soundscapes (he or they call them Enossifications) really paint a vivid picture of the weird assembly line. Gabriel's voice is distorted by Eno to make him sound quite alien, and the music trips along on a sort of shuffle, only short of finger-clicks, building towards something as Rael watches the odd spectacle of ”People stocked in every shade/ Must be doing well with trade/ Stamped, addressed in odd fatality/ That evens out their personality” and for the first time in a while Gabriel gets to unleash the manic side of his voice.

What this is about, of course, I have no idea, although it could be a clever comment on the wasting of human resources, or how people are treated like commodities. “Back in NYC” is new wave ten years before it hit, with a burbling synth from Banks leading the line, and Gabriel screaming the vocal, which seems to look back to Rael's start as a street gang member. Interesting possible irony when he snarls ”Your progressive hypocrites hand out the trash/ But it was mine in the first place/ So I'll burn it to ash!” This is indeed suddenly a very different Genesis, and it's obvious to see that Gabriel was, through his bandmates, trying out ideas that would surface on his own solo albums, as this in particular reminds me of the main melody from “On the air” off his second one. It's also clear from the lyric here that Rael is not anyone's hero; in fact, if anything he's an anti-hero, as he spits ”I don't care who I hurt/ I don't care who I do wrong!”

It's also worth noting that this is an album that uses the word “rape”, and although music uses that liberally now, in 1974 this was surely a big culture shock, especially from a band who had, up to that time, not been known for their abrasive lyrics. To put it simply, through Gabriel's acerbic lyrics Genesis had got angry all of a sudden. It's very raw, very in-your-face; for a band more used to gentle acoustic interludes and songs about nymphs and wolves, this is a major change for Genesis, which may be one of the reasons why it didn't sit too well with the other bandmembers. At least there's a guitar instrumental in “Hairless Heart” before Gabriel pushes the envelope further with a wickedly tongue-in-cheek but risque song about sexual practices in “Counting Out Time”, with a real rocking beat and a sly grin and a twist of the lip in a devil-may-care vocal from Gabriel.

”Erogenous zones I love you!” he exults. ”Without you, what would a poor boy do?” And those who have been brought up on albums like Selling England by the Pound, Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme shake their heads and wonder what the world is coming to when a band like Genesis can sing about teenage sex? Genesis! Is nothing sacred? It's got a very poppy, almost David Cassidy style about it, which jars violently with the OTT lyric and the unexpectedly harsh guitar that punches through, reminding us this is a rock song, dammit, not pop! Something like a kazoo leaves us wondering though. We may also wonder where the story has gone at this point, and don't ask me because I really have no idea, but this attempts to get it somewhat back on track, with the return of that soft, rippling piano from the opener and another standout, “The Carpet Crawl”.

A gentle vocal from Gabriel tells us that Rael has found himself in a chamber, along the floor of which people crawl, trying to reach the door, which is at the top of stairs they cannot climb. Opinions differ wildly about what the chamber is, but I like the idea that it is the womb, where fertilised eggs struggle towards the light to be born. Or maybe not. In any case, it's driven, once it gets going, on a lovely guitar melody, and paraphrases Hawkwind's Choose Your Masques when he sings “We've got to get in to get out” as its main chorus motif. It really is a beautiful song, the first ballad on the album and a fine example of Steve Hackett's unbridled talent. There's a slight increase in intensity as the song progresses, perhaps to reflect the anxiety of the carpet crawlers as they try to reach the faraway door, but basically it keeps the same melody throughout until it fades out at the end. I should also mention there is some truly stunning backing vocalwork here from the others, notably Collins.

Rael, of course, not having to crawl, is easily able to reach the portal and walking through it finds himself in “The Chamber of 32 Doors”, unsure which one to exit via. Around him, people rush to and fro, trying different doors, trying to find the right one. A metaphor for decisions made, perhaps, or the fear in all of us of taking the wrong path at a crucial time in our lives? There's also cold irony in the discovery that those who manage to make it out of the room below only really exchange one prison for another, as they wander here through door after door, returning to the same place every time, trapped in almost a repeating loop. A powerful guitar kicks the melody off, and Rael, just like everyone else, finds that it's hard to pick the right door. Bells peal and choral vocals then give way to a rising, urgent keyboard line and a hopping bassline as Gabriel considers the merits of country folk and workingmen, preferring to trust ”A man who works with his hands” than a businessman, perhaps a shot at their treatment by record companies in the past? Nice piano lines from Banks, and for a six-minute song it goes through many changes. In the end, Rael sinks down, exhausted, as ”Every single door that I walk through/ Brings me back here again” and he prays for ”Someone to believe in/Someone to trust.”

This brings to an end the first disc, and rather appropriately too, as we leave Rael confused and alone, desperate, not knowing which door to choose, literally at a crossroads in his life, trying to find the path that will take him away from this eternal loop of time.

Help is at hand though in “Lilywhite Lilith”, which opens disc two and introduces us to the strange blind woman who asks for help, is aided by Rael and who guides him by feeling the breeze and determining which is the correct door. It's a big powerful rocker, driven on guitar and pounding drums, with Lilith leaving Rael in a cold stone chamber with the chilling remark ”They're coming for you/ Now don't be afraid”. The piece slows down as something approaches, light floods the room and we're into “The Waiting Room”, where strange, eerie sounds (Eno again) fill the air --- tinkling, crashing, ringing, very expressionist, with what may be violins making a kind of dark laughter, creaking doors, thumps and steps and many other weird and alien sounds, all serving to unnerve the listener and put them on their guard, wondering what is going to happen. This strange passage of sound goes on for over five minutes, nodding to effects from Floyd's “On the Run” and “Welcome to the Machine”, leading into “Anyway”, a beautiful piano run from Banks against which Rael, believing he is dying or dead, reflects on the nature of life, God and Heaven and Hell, asking ”Does Earth plug a hole in Heaven/ Or Heaven plug a hole in Earth?” and then in “Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist” Rael meets Death.

On a strummed guitar, it's pretty much an instrumental, with barely four lines of lyric and evidence of melodies Hackett would use on the next album. It then leads to yet another standout track, as we reach the second ballad and Rael meets “The Lamia”. These are strange, exotic, erotic snakelike females who seduce him, tasting of his blood but then dying as they do so. It's driven on beautiful classical piano and flute which softly undulates like the very snake-creatures who give it its title. A tale of beauty never lasting, it's a beautiful tragedy, so well written, and when Gabriel sings ”With the first drops of my blood in their veins/ Their faces are convulsed in mortal pain/ The fairest cries “We all have loved you, Rael” you really feel the tragedy unfolding. The hero is suffused by a dreadful sorrow as the corpses of the Lamia now float on the water beside him, love changed so quickly and so horribly to death. Aghast, horrified, lost, Rael consumes the flesh of the Lamia (why?) and leaves the pool, the saddest instrumental Genesis have I think ever written following him as “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats” brings this chapter to a shuddering, heart-rending close. It's again mostly Banks, making sounds with his synth like the honking of ships, sad sounds of sorrow and grief, and it fades in like a slow classical concerto on trombone, with attendant choral voices from the Pro Soloist, rising to a pitch of sorrow that brings tears, and then slowly fading back out, the two songs (which originally ended side three of the four-side double vinyl album) making this one of the most moving sections on the entire record.

Everything changes then for “The Colony of Slippermen”, which is divided into three sections, the first, “Arrival”, opening on a weird little instrumental that would not be out of place on a Tom Waits album, then bouncing into the song itself, wherein Rael meets the grotesque Slippermen, who are all deformed, and is informed that they too have tasted the flesh of the Lamia, and this fate awaits him also. In addition, he is reunited with his brother, John, who has undergone the same transformation. On a crazy, trippy, madcap beat the song rides along, almost like some children's nursery rhyme or game, Bank's bubbling mellotron pulling everything along, some great vocal harmonies and typically odd vocalisations from Gabriel as he takes on the persona of a Slipperman. Rael and John are advised that the only cure for what they have is to have their penises removed (yeah) and to this end they go to visit Doktor Dyper, in “A Visit to the Doktor”, as the same basic tune, increasing in urgency and coming quite close, if I'm honest, to elements that would surface six years later on the Duke album, carrying the song.

However, once the deed has been performed, a raven swoops down and grabs the tube into which Rael's pride and joy has been put, and flies off with it. The romping keyboard run that forms most of “Raven” has become ever since enshrined in the medley Genesis play onstage and so is very recognisable to concert-goers. Rael asks John to help him chase the raven, but just as he did from outside of the cage, his brother refuses and walks away. Rael pursues the bird until it finally drops the tube into a stream, and Rael watches in despair as it floats away. Again, eerie sounds on the synth create the ambience here in “Ravine” and then we come almost full circle with “The Light Dies Down On Broadway”: as Rael walks disconsolately along the riverbank he suddenly sees a screen in front of him in the air (the same cloud that brought him here?) showing images of New York and his past life, and he feels homesick.

Reprising the melody from the title track as well as “The Lamia”, it's a clever reminder of what has gone before and serves to link the two halves of the album, but before he can move towards the cloud, Rael hears shouting and sees that his brother is struggling in the rapids, and has to make the decision: does he go forward and find his way home, abandoning the brother who twice left him to fend for himself, or does he turn his back on his escape route and save John? With a despairing look as the window begins to close, he turns away and goes to help his ungrateful brother. “Riding the Scree” has a real funk about it, peppered all over with Banks's keyboard parts from “Supper's ready” and a sonorous organ. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't conjure up an image of the title to me, and I hear elements again that would be used in Duke, years later, but it ends on a big powerful synth run and soft keys into “In the Rapids”, in which Rael manages to rescue his brother, holding on tight but seeing his face change to ... his own?

There's quite a lonely melody attending this, which is unexpected, as you would expect a big, frenetic, exciting denoument, but it's very low key. Some really nice guitar work, soft percussion and piano, almost a ballad in effect, then at the end it ramps up as it rises into the final track, the enigmatic “It”. Bouncing along on a fast rocky beat, it's supposed to be I guess the explanation of what has happened, and in essence it seems John and Rael have merged, or were the same person all along, perhaps each being aspects of the one personality, which has now become one. There's a lot of wordplay in the lyric, and even time for Gabriel to tip a sly wink to his listeners when he claims ”If you think that it's pretentious/ You've been taken for a ride!” This closing section also survived into Genesis's live set, usually merged with a truncated “Watcher of the Skies”. At the end, Gabriel even paraphrases Jagger as he fades out on ”It's only knock and knowall/ But I like it.” He could be saying here that those who think they know it all (music critics?) love to knock Genesis's music, or even that he's the know-it-all, knocking on the doors of consciousness and perception, carrying on Jim Morrison's stated aim with the Doors. Or it could be just gibberish, who knows?

TRACK LISTING

DISC ONE

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Fly On a Windshield
Broadway Melody of 1974
Cuckoo Cocoon
In the Cage
The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
Back in NYC
Hairless Heart
Counting Out Time
The Carpet Crawl
The Chamber of 32 Doors

DISC TWO

Lilywhite Lilith
The Waiting Room
Anyway
Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist
The Lamia
Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats
[COLOR="Green"]The Colony of Slippermen
(i) Arrival
(ii) A Visit to the Doktor
(iii) Raven
Ravine
The Light Dies Down On Broadway
Riding the Scree
In the Rapids
It

I'm happy to take the explanation of the plot provided by Wiki guy, and drawn, it would seem, from the book The Annotated Lamb Lies down on Broadway by Jason Finegan, Scott MacMahan and members of Paperlate. It does a good job of deciphering the plot, and makes some conclusions I would agree with or that shed new light on something I had always found difficult to understand. However, as they say themselves, it's a mistake to think this album is “about something,” and is more “something that every listener must decide a personal meaning that satisfies as an explanation.” That's probably true about this album, but it does beg the question, what did Gabriel mean when he wrote this? He did not just sit down and string ideas, concepts, lyrics and meanings together without any overall cohesive vision. He knows what it's about, but like most artistes, he preferred to keep it shrouded in mystery, and still does. It's the age old answer to the question: “Well, what do you think it's about?”

Even if its meaning can't ever be comprehensively and definitively understood, even if it's a code that is so well written that it will never be broken, unless when he passes away Gabriel leaves an actual, clear and unambiguous explanation in his papers (which I believe is very unlikely; the mystery of The Lamb should outlive its creator), The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway remains one of the deepest, most intricate, well thought out and comprehensive works of not only Gabriel or Genesis's careers, but of progressive rock music, and more, of music itself. There are few concept albums that refuse to give up their secrets, but The Lamb is one that jealously guards its mystery, retaining the shroud over its meaning like the very cloud that descended on Times Square and spirited Rael away to this weird underground world.

But you can enjoy it for what it is, a collection of mostly pretty damn fine songs, some gorgeous linking instrumentals, a rollercoaster ride through either one man's descent into, and ascent from insanity, a drug-fuelled trip or dream, or an actual occurrence that can never be explained. It divides Genesis fans, with some thinking it was the pinnacle of their creativity while others believe this was the point were Genesis began eating its own tail, like the serpent of myth, and that had events not unfolded as they had, this could have spelled the end of the band. It's no secret that the tensions evident when making the album, Gabriel's insistence on almost total control and then his unlikely disappearance during its creation to work on a movie that never saw the light of day, all served to place undue strain on a band who were already beginning to fragment as that old chestnut, “musical differences”, hovered on the horizon.

To place him in the actual position of Rael in the real world, Gabriel, staring at the many doors he could walk through, was about to make a decision which would, for many Genesis adherents, lead indeed to silent sorrow in empty boats, and for the first time since they had played their tentative tunes on their debut album under the watchful eye of Jonathan King, the light was beginning to die down on Broadway.

Rating: 8.9/10

I'll read your review later in more detail, but for the moment I just want to say that I think Lamb is my favourite Genesis, in the sense that it provides the most satisfying listen. I don't listen to it all that often because of its length and the fact that it just feels totally wrong to listen to bits of it.

It was not always my favourite. When I first heard the first few songs I wondered what I had struck. The previous three studio albums showed a progression, but many of the songs could have been wrapped from one album to another without sounding out of place. The Lamb has a different sound, a difference that's hard to define but is nevertheless there. It's not just that the subject of the lyrics has shifted radically from being quintessentially English, to suddenly embracing American culture. There is something subtly different about the musical sound as well.

Lots of people don't particularly like this album, and if they are the kind of people who tend to listen in snatches then I can understand why, because some of the songs don't hold up that well out of context, but they are essential to the whole.

Is the album just a collage of crazy images and situations, or is there a story, or at least some kind of statement being made? I think there is, but I'll leave that until I have more time to discuss it properly.

Although a member of one of the most successful and influential progressive rock bands of the last century, Tony Banks is something of a quiet enigma, certainly compared to his bandmates. Phil Collins, we know, had a very high-profile solo career, and for a while Peter Gabriel was in the charts and doing well. Even now, he's highly regarded and respected as a musician. Mike Rutherford, too, made a name for himself outside of Genesis with his solo project, Mike and the Mechanics. But Tony? Despite being an accomplished keyboard maestro, and an excellent songwriter, and having been in Genesis from the very beginning, he's the one about whom you tend to hear very little, whether inside of or outside of the band. Of course, Genesis are no longer together, but even when they were, Tony would always shy from the spotlight, preferring to noodle away in relative obscurity, unleashing amazing keyboard solos like the one in “One for the Vine”, the heavy organ sound that underpins “The Knife”, and even in more recent times, the thematic “Duke's Travels”, but still little is generally known about his solo work.

Unlike some of his contemporaries in Genesis, including ex-bandmember Anthony Phillips, who has gone on to have quite the career in classical music, Tony has not put out a slew of albums. In fact, between 1979 and this year he's only had eight in total, and two of them were soundtracks to movies. Two were also released under projects, 1989's Bankstatement and 1995's Strictly Inc., leaving him with basically five actual solo albums, two of which are suites for orchestra, the latest released this year.

A Curious Feeling - Tony Banks -1979)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ousFeeling.jpg

But though I've not heard everything he's written or played solo, and though Bankstatement was, for me, very hit and miss, with some great tracks and some real letdowns, his debut album, A Curious Feeling, hit all the right spots. Released without fanfare, without a picture of him on the sleeve, and with little or no media attention, it nevertheless quietly climbed into the top twenty album charts and remained there for over a month. It's a concept album, apparently (though I never knew it) based on the novel Flowers for Algernon, which I've never read and so can't confirm or deny it follows the storyline. What it does have, however, is no bad tracks and some really stunning ones. At a time when Mike Rutherford had yet to release any solo material, nor indeed Phil Collins, and while Peter Gabriel was just getting to grips with his second solo album, with Genesis about to hit the big time again with Duke the following year, A Curious Feeling is a gem of an album, showing effortless, natural talent without any big hubbub or ego.

But then, that's Anthony George “Tony” Banks for you.

It opens with a piano instrumental, as perhaps you might expect, but if you think this is going to be largely an album of piano and keyboard instrumentals and themes, you're off centre there. Originally intended to be the intro to Genesis's “Undertow” from the ...And Then There Were Three album, it's a powerful yet laidback tune with synths backing up the piano, really to be honest sounding more like something off Duke to me, especially “Heathaze”. It only lasts two and three quarter minutes, but serves as a delicious little entree to this feast of an album, followed by “Lucky Me”, an uptempo pop-sounding song which really looks forward, if unintentionally, to Genesis's later material on Invisible Touch, and the first vocal track with the late Kim Beacon taking the mike, as he does for the entire album, Tony content to hide behind the keyboard, where he's always been most comfortable.

“Lucky Me” displays many Genesis moments, but this will not be typical of the album, as it strikes out on its own, heading it its own direction. The voice of String Driven Thing's Beacon fits the material like a glove, and his vocal is clear, strong and passionate without ever taking over from the music, which is the lynchpin around which the album turns. Toiling quietly in the background, Tony paints a lavish soundscape with his keyboards, also taking guitar and bass duties, and some percussion, though most of this is delegated to Genesis on-the-road drummer Chester Thompson. “The Lie” is a very Duke-sounding piece, uptempo and boppy with a great piano melody racing it along, heavy synths keeping the background as the guitars chop it up and snarl away in quite a rocky tune. It falls into a sort of slow semi-reggae beat halfway in, with choral voices coming in to join the melody, and Kim sounding almost Colin Blunstone. Then Tony takes us back to 1974 with a keyboard line right out of The Lamb, before it all ramps back up again to head towards its boppy end. Not, I have to admit, one of my favourite tracks on the album, but then, that only shows how good the ones I rate are!

“After the Lie” is a much slower, moodier piece, with Beacon's voice low and almost echoing, Banks' piano taking centre stage, then supplemented by Alan Parsons-style marching keyboards and drums, as the vocal gets stronger and more insistent. There are some lovely little Banks moments in this song: piano runs, keyboard arpeggios, little glissandos, lovely stuff. A deep, humming choral synth keeps pace as the song heads into its third minute, then some spacey synth and light piano as everything slows down even further in almost Vangelis style, Beacon's vocal coming back in as the tempo begins to increase with the song moving into its denouement with some superb trumpeting keys from Tony taking the tune home in an almost brassy way.

The title track comes in on a shout and a big, happy keyboard sound, and is an uptempo, poppy song which could have made quite a decent single, had it been released. Beacon is on fine form here, singing his heart out, with Tony trying out all sorts of little tricks on the synth and making it sound like a whole band. It's a very uplifting song, and it leads into only the second instrumental on the album, but one of my favourite tracks. “Forever Morning” kind of revisits the theme of “From the Undertow”, with a heavy piano opening, then sliding into soft synth and arpeggiated keys, with a nice midsection where it goes all pastoral for a minute or two, nice soft piano passage with attendant bright keyboards, then a big finish as it crescendos up to the climax of the piece, first running off a sort of false ending before coming back with the triumphant finish.

Opening as a much slower, moodier song, “You” begins on jangly, expressive guitar with minimal synth backing and some nice vocal harmonies, percussion coming in almost unnoticed around the second minute before it kicks into life as it moves into the third, with a big crazy keyboard run again harking back to the best of The Lamb, flowing arpeggios and smooth synth runs everywhere as Banks takes over the melody, then it slows down in very Genesis fashion with a sonorous, deep booming choral synth, taking off again with trumpeting keyboard flourishes before it all fades down on light synth and piano to the end.

One of my very favorites, in fact I think I would put it as the standout, is up next, and “Somebody Else's Dream” comes in on a thumping, rolling drumbeat and squealy synth before a nice little piano line breaks in, and Beacon's vocal can be described as one of the very best on this album. It's a sombre, moody, tense piece with a lot of drama and urgency about it, with the intensity building as the song goes on, dropping back in the middle as the melody takes a little breather, a nice gentle piano line soon giving way to more urgent and heavy synthwork, and Beacon comes back for his final vocal lines in the song. The longest on the album at just under eight minutes, the last two minutes are totally instrumental as Banks really lets himself go on the keys in an almost operatic display of energy and drama.

A nice relaxing instrumental then, just the ticket after all that high-powered, intense playing, and a real respite in a lush little interlude; well, not really as it's over six minutes long, but it does bridge the gap between the energetic and dramatic “Somebody Else's Dream” and the final two tracks, and is the final instrumental on the album. Some rather nice soft guitar on it too, though it's soon supplanted by deep organ and warbly keys, with the piano coming back in to calm things down. Lovely little flutey sounds on the keys add to the sense of tranquility on the piece, but like a storm bubbling under, just held in check, the heavier keyboards and throaty synths are just waiting to be unleashed again, so that the track rises and falls like the tide, with crests and troughs, and is a thoroughly enjoyable ride, and a real testament to the undoubted and yet almost taken for granted prowess of Genesis's quiet keysman.

A mid-tempo ballad helps to close off and bookend the album, as “For a While” breezes along nicely with some bright guitar and some carefree keys, and another fine vocal performance from Kim Beacon, though by comparison it's a short song, just over three minutes, then the coda, or epilogue is a dark but moving little piano piece called “In the Dark”, with some effective flute and whistle sounds on the keys, but otherwise just the piano and Beacon's vocal, with some soft synth joining in with a sort of half-reprise of the theme from “Forever Morning”. A nice gentle and yet appropriate way to finish the album.

It's a pity this isn't better known; despite spending time in the top twenty I doubt many non-Genesis fans could point to it as a solo Genesis album, and yet although it was his debut it comes across to me as completely accomplished and professional, balanced and thoughtful, definitely more a project created by someone who loves music than a crass attempt to cash in on the Genesis name, or make a big splash in the charts. Not saying Gabriel or Collins had that in mind either - well, probably Collins - but it's nice to see that this album, rather like Mike Rutherford's later efforts before forming his band, concentrates more on making the sort of music the artist prefers than what will sell.

An undiscovered gem, without doubt. Go unearth it now.

TRACK LISTING

1. From the Undertow
2. Lucky Me
3. The Lie
4. After the Lie
5. A Curious Feeling
6. Forever Morning
7. You
8. Somebody Else's Dream
9. The Waters of Lethe
10. For a While
11. In the Dark

Rating: 9.4/10

I tell anyone who will listen that A Curious Feeling is a terrific album and in some senses is like a lost Genesis album. It's the most Genesis-sounding of Tony's solo efforts, but also has its own unique sound. "Somebody Else's Dream" is my favourite of the vocal tracks; this is where Kim Beacon really cuts loose.

Regarding the story that inspired the album: Flowers For Algernon originally appeared as a short story in a SF anthology. Later it was expanded into a novel, with extra bits added to the plot, but as I feel is so often the case it did not improve on the original short story, which packs all the necessary punch into fewer pages. It was also later made into a movie called "Charlie" or "Charly". My recommendation: read the original.

I found it rather interesting that both Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford released debut solo albums that were both based on novels. Coincidence, or a case of great minds?

Not to jump the gun on you, but I think some of Tony's other albums are also very good, though quite different from the debut. I heartily recommend both Still and Strictly Inc. Bankstatement was a little disappointing to me but has a few pretty good songs.

I agree with you about ACF being the kind of "lost Genesis album". It's definitely of the ATTWT/Duke mould more than, say, Bankstatement, which I also agree was quite a weak album. To be honest, I've only heard those two and I think Seven, which is mostly or all classical material, but I imagine Bankstatement is generally seen as one of his weakest albums.

There's a line in "Somebody Else's Dream" which I think encapsulates everything you need to know about Tony - "I like the work and I do it well, and that's enough for me." While Phil was out there changing his sound to get hits, and Peter was experimenting with world music, Tony really didn't care about chart success, but he did and does love his music, and I think it shows in at the very least this album. A criminally ignored classic.

It's actually from "Lucky Me :).

Re Tony's classical albums: most of the people who know them seem to say they get better as they go along, with "Seven" being somewhat weaker than "Six" and "Five". I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I thought I would mention.

There is also speculation that his releasing the albums in inverse chronological order was a way for Tony to intentionally flag that the series would terminate at a certain point, since he could not really go beyond "One". ;)

Well he could do an Ed (spit) Sheeran couldn't he? "Minus One," "Minus Two"? :laughing:

Yeah I realised it was the wrong song this morning as I was singing it in my head. Meant to change it, but you beat me to it. D'oh!

There is a video clip available of Tony performing "Waters of Lethe".

In interview he said he did not recall making that clip. I'm still not sure whether he was serious or having a little joke, given what the waters of Lethe refer to - a river in Hades that causes you to forget your past life after immersion.


Tony sometimes comes across as "the serious one". In fact he does have a sense of humour, but it's very British and understated.

Abacab (1981)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...0px-Abacab.jpg
Ah yes, the album that almost did for me with Genesis! After the sublime Duke, this was one hell of a bitter pill to swallow, and it's got Phil Collins' muddy handprints all over it. A huge shift of direction for Genesis, you can pinpoint this as the moment they stopped being a progressive rock - or even a rock - band, and succumbed entirely to pop and bland songs. I'm afraid that even forty years later I still have very little good to say about it. I hated it when it came out, and I only bought it because I'm a huge Genesis fan, but it grated on me. I played it through a few times, but never felt the urge to do so for pleasure; I just wanted to see if it got any better than the title track and lead single. It really doesn't.

Well, that's not quite fair. There are a few good tracks on it. Well, no, not really. Let's say there are a few that are not as bad as the general low quality of music on the album, but there are probably about two songs I would listen to again, if I had to. Although the decision to change their style so radically was, according to Mike Rutherford, a group one, you can't help but feel that Phil had a huge input into what they eventually released: so much of Abacab is similar to the sort of pop pap he peddled, and continues to peddle, on his solo albums.

It opens with the title track, and this was for me where it all began to go wrong. Okay, it has its prog moments, but generally this is driven by a very pop melody: it's fast, it's stripped-down, it's commercial. It's not the Genesis I had grown up with and loved. This was all right for the charts, but I don't want a full album of this! Sadly, I got my wish, but sort of would have preferred not to have. Far from all being songs like the title, much of the tracks on Abacab are far worse, many so bad in fact that they make the opener sound great, and that can't be good. I mean, the song doesn't even make any sense! ”When you wake in the morning/ Wake and find you're covered in cellophane/ There's a hole in there somewhere...” What?

People say that Duke showcased a new Genesis, a move away from the longer, progressive compositions of their previous years, but I don't agree: I still think that was a great prog rock album, and while it may have yielded some of their bigger hit singles, I would not have ever considered it a pop album. After all, ...And Then There Were Three gave them their biggest hit ever, “Follow you follow me”, and no-one would accuse them of being pop on that album! But this is definitely pop. “No Reply At All” is a pure pop tune, which cosys up rather unsettlingly to Collins' “I Missed Again”. The addition of the horn section from Earth, Wind and Fire just, for me, pulls Genesis further off their usual course and takes them into territory which would be successfully trod by their frontman for the next few years, but which never suited his band.

Things pick up a little in terms of song quality then for “Me and Sarah Jane”, one standout on an album which has few. Not surprisingly, it's helped achieve this status by being a song solely composed by Tony Banks, without any interference from Phil “I-have-a-solo-career-now” Collins, who seemed to think his direction for the band was the only one. Banks does his best to pull the ship hard-a-port and back towards their progressive roots with an atmospheric, tense and dramatic song which recalls the best of Duke, with soft percussion and breathy organ, the typical kind of Genesis lyric we've become used to, and expect, with some very nice understated guitar from Mike Rutherford. It's also one of the longer songs on the album, at six minutes exactly. Even the slightly reggae rhythm doesn't overshadow the power or melody of this song.

There's even a synthy midsection that reminds me of “Eleventh Earl of Mar” from Wind and Wuthering, and for six minutes you can start to really believe that the first two tracks were just aberrations, that you may have to skip over them next time you spin the album, but that now at last Abacab is back on track, and all is well with the world. Unfortunately, that's far from the case, as “Keep It Dark” amply demonstrates, with its annoying squeaky synth (oh, Tony! How could you?) and although there's a rocky guitar line held by Rutherford, it's a pretty weak song which tries to tell a song of alien abduction but ends up getting a little lost along the way. It does inject a little of that old Genesis synth and keyboard sound, but when it reaches the chorus, which is disappointingly flat.

Ah, let's be honest: it's not the worst track on the album (that's yet to come!) and I do have a sneaking place in my heart for the two-part “Dodo/Lurker”, which between them make up the longest track on the album at seven and a half minutes. Starting off with powerful synth and guitar, the song soon settles into a decent groove, Banks' keys again a little light and bubbly for my tastes, but not too annoying. Rutherford keeps the hard guitar line he's famous for while Collins sings about, well, the dodo. Actually, the song seems to be about man hunting creatures to extinction for profit. I think. Again, there's a reggae beat to at least the first part of the song, “Dodo”, exacerbated by Collins' infuriating attempts at singing in that vein, but Banks and Collins pull the song back on track, then “Lurker”, the second part, becomes a proper prog-rock monster, Banks' warbling keys working here where before they seemed so out of place, then replaced with heavy synth, sharp guitar from Rutherford holding the line.

But that's it. We're now into the worst track on the album, and the worst Genesis song ever. The truly awful “Whodunnit” sounds like someone trying - unsuccessfully - to write their first song. It's really pathetic. Talk about simple. Big blasting drums and sliding bass under Collins' “inspired” lyric - ”Was it you, or was it me/ Was it he or was it she?” and the equally annoying chorus, if it can be called such, consisting of the words ”We know” repeated, then back to the verse, another chorus and then the drums crash into the ending, the whole thing falling away in a fading drop of pitch-bend as if even it has given up. I really can't say how much I hate this song: at three minutes twenty-three seconds it's exactly three minutes twenty-three seconds too long. Awful, just awful. How could one of my favourite bands have unleased this tripe on us?

It gets a little better, though not that much. “Man On the Corner” is a nice little ballad, reprising the opening from “Me and Sarah Jane” and with some really emotional keyboards from Banks, but it owes a lot of its melody structure to the likes of “In the Air Tonight” and “This Must Be Love”, so I see it as more a Phil Collins solo song than a Genesis one, while “Like It Or Not”, the only Mike Rutherford solo effort on the album, is another ballad, and indeed another standout, with its lovely drum roll opening, soft synths and Collins' vocal wistful and yearning, a great hook with a lovely fadeout ending. Why couldn't they have written more songs like this? It's almost out of place on this album.

The closer is total filler. If only they'd finished on “Like It Or Mot”, I could possibly have felt a little better about this album, but “Another Record”, although it starts off with promising synth and piano melody, turns out to be just totally forgettable, and like much of the album it fades out at the end, and the only really positive thing I can say about it is that it brings this stain on Genesis' long career to an end.

Thankfully, the next album, which they just titled Genesis, almost as if they were going back to basics, was far better (wouldn't be hard) and slid back towards the progressive rock they had built their career on, but the pop idea was never going to go away, and there are one or two on that album, which then led to Invisible Touch and then general decline for Genesis as a prog-rock band. Following the excellent We Can't Dance, the end was in sight, and there really was no way back.

TRACK LISTING

1. Abacab
2. No Reply At All
3. Me and Sarah Jane
4. Keep it Dark
5. Dodo/Lurker
6. Whodunnit?
7. Man On the Corner
8. Like It Or Not
9. Another Record

Rating: 5.0/10

There are two tracks on Abacab that I quite like: the title track, and "Like It or Not". "Me and Sarah Jane" is not too bad. The rest? I can quite happily live without them.

I dislike "No Reply At All" almost as much a I dislike "Whodunnit?", though to be fair this is not intrinsically bad in itself, it's more that the sound is totally at odds with even the rest of this album, let alone the rest of Genesis' catalogue to that point. Those horns, mimicking the line that has just been sung - Urrgh. Maybe on second thoughts I DO think it's bad. Still it wouldn't be that bad on a Phil Collins album.

Annoyingly, "Abacab", which is probably my favourite (or least unfavourite) on the album, mainly for its musical groove and definitely not the lyrics, fades out just as it sounds as though some really interesting modulation is about to occur. This is one occasion where I think a bit of a jam would have improved the song, and thereby the album.

Yeah I'm with you there. If he notices it, expect a stout and vigorous defence of this album by Neapolitan; we've had knock-down rows over it. I swear, when I first heard this, as it says in the first sentence, I almost gave Genesis up as a bad job. I could not believe how trite and poppy it sounded. In fact, the stage was set before I heard the album as the single, and title track, was on the radio, and I could not believe when the DJ said that's the new single from Genesis. You know, now I think about it, he might even have said the new single from Phil Collins, which would not have surprised me.

I don't hate the album, but I never listen to it and it's right down there at the bottom of the pile with the debut. Even Calling All Stations gets more love than Abacab does from me (though that isn't much - there's not a hell of a lot between the two albums). I can acknowledge the quality of maybe four tracks, as I say above, but for the rest, Phil can just go shove his horns and his samba rhythms and his written-out-on-the-toilet lyrics right back where they came from.
https://c.tenor.com/sCdo8DW21XQAAAAC/boo-outrage.gif

^^ The saying "different strokes" applies in so many situations, especially on music fora.

I've had many - shall we say "animated discussions" - about ...And Then There Were Three, an album on which I seem to hold a minority opinion, but I've learned to shrug my shoulders and respect the other person's opinion as long as they respect mine. I'm sure we'll get to discussion of that album in due course.

Absolutely. I respect Nea's right to like/love that album, it's just he doesn't seem to be prepared to afford me the same respect. We have blazing rows about it, and he even brings it up in snide comments on subjects to which it isn't related, eg "Trollheart can't even appreciate Abacab so what does he know" kind of thing. It's boring, but also annoying, which is why I tend not to rise to him these days.

We will of course get to ATTW3 but next I'm heading back in time to a seventies classic, so don't hold yer breath... ;)

ATTW3 WAS a seventies classic!

The very end of the 70s. I'm talking some guy called Gabriel Peter or something like that... not sure he worked out but they gave him a shot.

Currently listening to A Curious Feeling. I think "The Lie" is my second favourite, thought most of the fans seem to prefer its sequel, "After the Lie". I particularly like the abrupt change of tempo in the middle section.

Having been, it is said, discovered by impresario (and later child molester) Jonathan King, though used by him to play the music he wanted them to and not the music they wanted to and were capable of, Genesis and he parted company after their first, far from wildly successful album. The band were now free to explore the more creative side of their music, without worrying about someone trying to direct them towards hit singles. The last album to feature guitarist Anthony Phillips, you could say he lost out on a chance at fame and fortune, but Phillips found that he suffered from chronic stagefright, and once Genesis became well known and began to gig properly that would have been a major problem. You can't have one member of the band who refuses to appear onstage, can you? So after this album he made the decision to leave, and admits himself he never regretted it, nor had any real choice in the matter at the time.

Nevertheless, with or without him, this album - which most fans see as Genesis's first real album - would be the one that would begin to define and shape their sound and their musical identity, and lead to them spearheading the progressive rock movement of the seventies, and eventually becoming household names, despite having really only a small number of hit singles in their now over forty years together. This album would be something of a barometer as to what a progressive rock album could be, following in the footsteps of the likes of Procol Harum and Van Der Graaf Generator, and would set them on a road that, while far from being an easy one to stardom, would elevate them into the highest echelons of music and inspire generations of musicians for decades to come.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Trespass70.jpg
Trespass (1970)

Beginning a relationship that would last for pretty much all of their career (the last official release on Charisma was 1986's Invisible Touch, though future recordings, made on the Virgin label, can still in effect be said to have been on Charisma, as Branson's monster absorbed the smaller label in 1983) and make a success of what was then a struggling minor label (Tony Stratton-Smith used to manage bands in his spare time, when he was not writing sports articles in his job as journalist), only in existence two years but fated to become inextricably linked with not only Genesis, but progressive rock bands, Trespass is really the dawning of what would become known as the Gabriel era, which would last up until 1975, when he would leave the band to pursue a solo career.

Although every musician on the album deserves credit, the first thing you hear when the needle hits the vinyl (yeah, yeah!) is the plaintive voice of Peter Gabriel as he declares he is “Looking for Someone”, the title indeed of the opening track. Next Tony Banks's soft synth lines smooth in before percussion cuts in and Anthony Phillips's guitar comes into the mix too, filling out what had been a rather hollow, lonely sound. You can already see here how Gabriel is able to switch from a fairly gentle vocal to a more animated, almost manic one at times, as he does in the first verse here. Certain publications, including of course Wiki, have labelled this as pastoral music, and yes, some of it most certainly is. But it would be a mistake to think there are no more intense, faster, punchy moments on the album. Tracks like “The Knife” (which closes the album, and is anything but pastoral), “Visions of Angels” and parts of “White Mountain” all speak to a band more than ready to rock out when the occasion, or the song, demands it. To think of this as a folk album or something would be wildly inaccurate and well short of the mark. There are many folk-tinged passages on it, to be sure, but it is so much more than that. Before our eyes, a whole new way of crafting songs is coming into being.

Not that I'm suggesting that Genesis began progressive rock or anything, but up to the release of this album the only thing comparable in sound would have been the likes of The Moody Blues and to some extent Van der Graaf Generator, though the latter tended to have a harder, more jazzy edge to their music. Procol Harum were tinkering with such ideas too, but Genesis seem to have been the first band to really explore this idea of, for the want of another phrase, “English countryside music” and marry it to harder, rockier sections, often in the same song. Yes had released their debut album the previous year, but even that was more symphonic than what Genesis were doing. Genesis would have many imitators, some of whom would carry on into the twenty-first century with the likes of Big Big Train and Gazpacho using their template - often a little too closely - but few if any would ever approach their unique style over the years.

Other, non-standard instruments are used on this album too. Not for the first time ever do we hear flutes and accordions - Zappa, Tull, The Moodies, all of these and probably more had used them by this point - but I feel Genesis tend to blend them better into their compositions here. Also one of the first bands to bring keyboards to the fore (The Nice had of course led the way under Keith Emerson, and later with ELP, and Yes would also champion the keyboard), an instrument that is now not only synonymous with but integral to any prog rock band, even now. Can you think of a prog rock outfit that doesn't use keys? Neither can I. Anyway, back to the album. We're only on track one and we have a ways to go yet.

Less than two minutes into the seven-minute opener and we have a galloping drumbeat develop as Banks fires off the Hammond organ. It slows down then for an instrumental passage, and if you're a fan you should be able to hear the embryonic “Supper's Ready” in there. In the fourth minute it kicks up again, striding into another but heavier instrumental section, driven by Banks's Hammond again with flourishes from Gabriel's flute. The guitar from Phillips comes in here pretty heavily too. I will admit that this song has never been one of my favourites on the album, and tends usually to kind of pass me by when I play it. Even now, as I review it, it's not quite engaging my attention and interest as other songs on Trespass will. A slick little guitar solo then as we near the end of the song, more flute and we end as we began on Gabriel's yearning vocal.

It's not the most powerful or, indeed, impressive of starts, but with elements of “Return of the Giant Hogweed” in its closing sections, it's a statement of intent by a new band who choose to start their “first” album off with a seven-minute song that changes more times than the Irish weather. You can't say they're not ambitious, and playing it safe has been firmly removed from the table. Going further off the reservation, so to speak, they then decide to tell the tale of treachery and betrayal in the world of the wolf, as we move into “White Mountain”, a song with not a single intrusion by a human, a beautiful acoustic guitar by Mike Rutherford taking it in, backed by soft, humming keys before Gabriel begins the tale. The song bears the title of the album, so technically it can be regarded as the title track, and it speaks of a wolf called Fang (hmm) who trespasses on the sacred ground of his people, and is pursued and killed for it.

”Outcast he trespassed where no-one may tread/ The last sacred haunt of the dead” snarls Gabriel, as the pack sets off after Fang. There's quite the role for flute here, and Banks's frenetic keys set up a great atmosphere of a chase, a hunt, helped along by new drummer John Mayhew's thunderous fusilade, but the song really rides on Rutherford's uptempo acoustic guitar, his first real chance to step out from behind Anthony Phillips and show what he can do. This song, too, is long - well, they all are: the album only has seven tracks - though slightly less so than the opener at a shade under seven minutes, and like “Looking for someone” it changes as it goes along, another hallmark of what was slowly coalescing as progressive rock. In the middle it stops to a slow, doomy march, as Fang is accused of the crime for which he stands trial, Gabriel in the character of the old wolf chieftain One-Eye loudly declaiming behind slow, almost funereal drums, which I consider a great performance from Mayhew, though he would be fired after this album ”Only the king sees the crown of the gods/ And he, the usurper must die!”

Another sprightly keyboard run is the backdrop for the fight between Fang and One-Eye, with the old wolf emerging victorious, and Gabriel's flute plays a soft, sad but victorious melody as whistling takes us out, accompanied by the humming chant that began the song. If that was characterised by Phillips's and Rutherford's guitars though, “Visions of Angels” rides almost entirely on Banks's piano and keyboard lines, and I've always wondered if Gabriel used some sort of phased effect on his voice as it gets kind of, I don't know, metallic or something, a little out of phase. Banks's swirling keyboard attack mocks the hymns sung in church as Gabriel snarls ”I believe there never is an end/ God gave up this world/ Its people long ago.” This is one of my favourite early Genesis songs; I've always loved it and I always will. Choral vocals wash over the keyboard as it stabs in fury towards a heaven that may not exist, and for a band whose original album was supposed to be based on the Bible, this is very much a stepping away from that, separating themselves out from what Jonathan King wanted and declaring their own leanings, making their own way, making their own music.

This is one of the songs too where the pure anger and bitterness Gabriel can put into his voice comes through very strongly, dropped to a soft croon and then building again to that raging, impotent fury as the song winds to a close. Almost the longest track on the album at just short of nine minutes, “Stagnation” tells the tale of the last man on Earth, who retreated to a bunker deep beneath the planet, and survived, but alone. He sings of his loneliness, how he misses the things he used to take for granted, and quite possibly at the end goes mental. Phillips drives this with his smooth electric guitar lines, dancing and weaving through Gabriel's voice which, beginning soft and almost murmuring, soon changes to a more strident, insistent, accusatory and then pleading tone as the enormity of his loneliness, the totality of his being the only human left alive sinks in.

He speaks as if to someone, but there is nobody there to hear him. The song is full of long instrumental interludes, each of which leads, it would seem, to a change in the man's mental attitude and sanity. After the first verse, a frenetic Hammond solo breaks out, hammering along and carrying the tune until eventually it builds to a mad crescendo and then just... stops. As it does, Gabriel sings ”Wait” and begins the next verse, in which he speaks of going home, or wishing he could. I think he's reliving the memories of the life he used to lead. The vocal here is again almost muttered, but gaining in strength as it goes on, then he uses that phased (if it is phased) effect again as his voice acquires a distinctly weird, almost alien tinge, all of which leads up to another big explosion of guitar and keyboard, the drums leading the passage in.

”I want a drink!” Gabriel yells. ”I want a drink to take all the dust and the dirt from my throat!” Then begins a slow flute melody that is taken up by the guitar and then the keyboard, getting stronger as it grows, Banks virtually hammering the keys as the song barrels to a close with a big intense flourish. “Dusk” is again propelled on a lovely, I think, twelve-string guitar with a soft vocal from Gabriel, and some really nice vocal harmonies. Almost immediately the music takes a turn towards the ominous, then slips back into its original groove, Hammond now sighing into the mix. This by far the shortest track on the album, barely over four minutes. There's some fairly prominent flute in it and some lovely classical guitar before it heads into its closing section with another phrase that will become a signature of this band. It ends quietly, but Banks sets his seal on the end by again hitting the final piano key with some force. Shortest is followed by longest, and when I first heard this it came as something of a surprise to me.

Genesis are not, and never have been, known for hard rock numbers. They have had, in the interim, some fast pop songs, yes, and some pretty intense passages in songs, but by and large you don't think of them in terms of what you get with “The Knife”, which seems to be a song about a Hitler-like figure who whips up his followers to revolution, advising them ”I'll give you the names of/ Those you must kill/ All must die with their children/ Carry their heads to the palace of old/ Hang them on stakes/ Let the blood flow!” It is interesting - and intentional of course - that the “messiah” figure makes sure he does not get his hands dirty, warning prophetically ”Some of you are going to die/ Martyrs of course to the freedom/ That I shall provide!” This all rides along on a bouncy, ebullient Hammond line from Banks, the euphoria of the masses being set free (so they think) to strike at their masters (those who stand in the way of their self-appointed leader) perfectly captured as the song careers along.

The guitars are almost boogie blues as they follow the keyboard melody, and Gabriel is at his most manic as he leads his followers through blood and fire to victory, or so he says. In around the middle everything falls away to Rutherford's ominously pulsing bass, then crying guitar before we hear the sound of an army, police force or other symbol of authority yelling ”Fire over their heads!” and the ensuing sounds of panic as people run headlong, trying to get away from the firefight, suddenly aware that they could be killed. Despite this obvious rout, Gabriel screams ”We have won!” and the song end on another powerful, frenetic guitar solo and keyboard passage as Gabriel yells, perhaps somewhat superfluously, ”Some of you are going to die/ Martyrs of course to the freedom/ That I shall provide!” and with some final hammered keyboard chords and a flurry on the drums, the curtain comes down.

TRACK LISTING

Looking for Someone
White Mountain
Visions of Angels
Stagnation
Dusk
The Knife

From beginning to end, you can see right through this album that this is a new Genesis, the real Genesis if you will. Mike Rutherford would later characterise From Genesis to Revelation as nothing more than "a bunch of kids on their holidays", and as I said in the previous review, that's pretty much what it feels like: some young lads taking time off school to go and have a few larks bashing out some tunes. Despite what King wanted or hoped for, this at that time was not a band who were ready for the charts, and they were never going to make him big money.

This, however, was a total different proposition. The earnestness with which the band worked, the blood, sweat and tears you can hear leaking out of every song, as Gabriel struggled to get the words perfect, and indeed the songcraft in these six songs, show a band ready to stop playing around and get down to the serious business of playing music. It helped of course that the album had mostly been played in its entirety (not in one go of course, but tracks from it) live, so Genesis already had an idea what people liked, and more to the point, what they didn't like.

The strain of making and touring the album though, together with a bout of glandular fever and severe stagefright would cause Anthony Phillips to depart the band, shocking his compatriots but leaving them no choice but to audition for a replacement, which they would find in a young guitarist called Steve Hackett. Drummer John Mayhew, having failed to meet the exacting standards of the band, would be let go too, and be replaced by a lad called Collins, as what would become the classic Genesis lineup of the seventies coalesced.

Although Trespass sold a mere six thousand copies on its release, hardly world-shattering sales, the band were pleased with its reception and soon set about recording its follow up. This would contain some future classics, though decent sales would continue to elude them, as would chart success, for a time.

But then, these guys were young, and time was one thing they had in abundance.

Rating: 9.8/10

I passed on Trespass for many years. I think I must have heard The Knife at some point (pun intended); I didn't like it on first hearing and I'm still not crazy about it, and that made it easy to assume that the band had not yet found that sound for which I loved their later works. I actually acquired the debut album before getting Trespass.

Things changed when i heard White Mountain played on one of those "Internet radio stations". The song was unfamiliar but I instantly recognised it as Genesis.

For me there are three clear standouts on the album: White Mountain, Stagnation and Dusk.
Looking For Someone is OK but seems like a song that has not quite come together yet. Visions of Angels is nice, I suppose; most bands would be pleased to have a song like this in their catalogue, but I think it's a little bland by Genesis standards.

Had I been producing the album, I think I would have sequenced it by moving The Knife to the beginning, allowing the album to finish with Dusk, which would have made a perfect closer. When I listen to the album I generally program it to play in that order.

On the Tabletop Genesis podcast, they interviewed Tony Banks, and he had this to say about John Mayhew (paraphrasing from memory): people listen to Trespass and they say what was wrong with Mayhew's drumming. And in fact he was a competent drummer, but what he could not do was improvise, to put his own stamp on the music. Banks and the others really had to tell him how a certain part should be played, and then he would play it. In other words he was more like a session musician than a member of the band.

Banks made similar comments about a couple of the singers he worked with later in his career, Jayney Climek and Alastair Gordon; they had great voices and vocal technique, but did not seem able to put anything of themselves into the songs, so Tony felt more as if he was programming an instrument than working with fellow musicians.

At this point, the fine line between Genesis and Phil Collins as a solo artist blurs so much that the penultimate album to feature him could easily in most cases be mistaken as one of his. Bringing much of his r&b and soul influences to many of the tracks, cutting shorter and more commercial songs, with only really Tony Banks trying to keep the longer, more epic tracks in a bid to retain something, anything of the Genesis motif, the thirteenth album was certainly unlucky for some, myself included. I don't hate it, but I see it as the natural progression from Abacab and much of Genesis, to where the band could hardly even be afforded the description progressive rock.

Of course, the continuing new direction increased their popularity, leading Brett Easton Ellis's psychopath killer in his cult novel American Psycho to laud this album as their best (a lot he knew!) and giving the band their first ever number one hit single in the US of A, when the title track went to the top. The album itself was another number one in the UK, making it four in a row, while it hit the number three slot in the USA. At this point, certainly from a Stateside point of view, it was fair to say Genesis, the new Genesis, had arrived. But was the old Genesis dead, or were there still a few breaths left in its slowly-dying body as it began to give up the ghost but refused to die without a fight?
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Invisible Touch (1986)

I don't know what an invisible touch is, but she has one, apparently. Or at least, she seems to. After a tour to promote their twelfth album, a third solo effort from Collins, the birth of Mike + The Mechanics to keep Mike Rutherford busy, and an album of soundtracks from Tony Banks imaginatively entitled Soundtracks :rolleyes: Genesis reconvened to record their next album. It was three years on from the release of the self-titled, and they were riding pretty high on the success of singles like “Mama” and “That's All”, pulling in new fans while probably ditching older ones. Their next album would capitalise on the success, both of the new Genesis and of Phil Collins's somewhat meteoric rise to solo fame, as his hits easily eclipsed those of his parent band - indeed, he was doing so well on his own that there were whispers that he would not return to the band and that Genesis had split. Perhaps sadly in retrospect, this would not turn out to be the case.

Rattling, tumbling drums power in the title track, with a jangly, poppy guitar from Rutherford and Genesis make no apologies for the new direction they were going in as they open the new album up. And why would they? It got them to number one; who cared about some old stuck-in-the-mud fans who had carried them through the seventies? That was the past, man, and this was the Genesis of the future. Musically, if not actually literally, a rebirth that would see the band move further and further into pop territory until eventually ... Well, more of that to come. Much of this album has been dogged by the accusation that it could really be a Phil Collins solo album, and it's hard to refute that, when you listen to many of the tracks, “Invisible Touch” being a prime example. Again, it's not the Genesis we know, even the Genesis of “That's All” or the terrible “Illegal Alien”. It's not even the gentle Genesis of “Follow You Follow Me” or even the somewhat more acerbic but still recognisable Genesis that pushed “Mama” into the charts. All of those were, to one degree or another, possible to tie down as being Genesis songs. But this could have been written and played by anyone from Go West to Duran Duran. There's just nothing in the song that reminds me of old Genesis, and even Banks's synths are snappy rather than sonorous, poppy rather than placid and jumping rather than rippling. The rot has set in.

Do I need to describe the song? You all know it, even those who hate Genesis will have heard it on the radio or TV. It was, after all, at number one so you could hardly avoid it. I feel it's devoid of any real emotion or connection to the band, and if I didn't know better would have thought it could have been written for them, but given Collins's embracing of the worlds of pop, soul and even jazz on his solo albums, it shouldn't really come as too big a surprise. But for me, it was not a pleasant one. Bah, there's not even a bridge! Oh, and let's utilise the most cliched of cliches in pop music, changing the key up one octave for the final chorus. Boo. The overuse of electronic drum machines is also unwelcome, and further evidence if any were needed of their changing musical style.

There is some hope though, as the second track is one of those (almost) old Genesis epics, even if it is basically a love song that runs for nearly nine minutes. It has a spooky intro thanks to Banks's keys and, it has to be admitted, the damn drum machine. Originally tentatively titled “Monkey/Zulu”, it eventually became “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” (think I preferred the working title!) and was, rather amazingly, released in a very truncated form as a single, getting to number three in the US and 18 here. I haven't heard the single version, but they chopped about fifty percent out of the song, so I assume the best parts were removed, including the instrumental midsection. There are echoes of both “Mama” and “Misunderstanding” here in the lyric, but it is the powerful instrumental midsection that really makes the song for me, leading us almost back down the path and over the garden wall (sorry) to a time when Genesis made superb, intricate, thoughtful music and the word “pop” was a bad one.

It can't be argued of course that the instrumental part is what extends the song to its somewhat overlong eight minutes fifty-two seconds, as it runs for more than three minutes, but I still can't really envision the shorter version being as good. Anyway, such thoughts are soon brushed aside as we have bigger problems. “Land of Confusion” carries us kicking and screaming through the Chamber of 32 Doors and back to the world of pop, where yet another hit single is waiting. With a very clever video made by those Spitting Image people, it's a song that really suffered from being upstaged by its video. I mean, it's okay, but it's nothing terribly special. At least Rutherford gets to take control, banging out the riffs like there's no tomorrow, while the boys enjoy some close-harmony backing vocals. Again, I'm sure you know the song; it, or at least its video, was on constant rotation on the likes of MTV throughout 1986. Another big hit (14 in the UK and 4 in the US), I suppose it showed if nothing else that there would be no backdown from Genesis now. This album was cementing their place as a true pop band with bona fide hits, and opening their music to a much wider audience, and they were never going back to Broadway.

In essence, a kind of political song whose message I feel was lost in the comic video, but it certainly did the business for them, as did the next one, the fourth single and one of the two ballads on the album (unless you count “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” as a ballad, which personally I don't). “In Too Deep” is, to be fair, a beautiful song but it smacks of Phil Collins solo material, and hovers close to songs like “One More Night”, “Take Me Home” and “Separate Lives”. The ticking drum machine is right out of “Thru These Walls” (note: see how Collins was already pandering to America by using the non-English spelling? Dickhead) and “In the Air Tonight”, although in fairness Banks plays some gorgeous piano and orchestral synth, and Collins's vocal is smooth, though at this point I had had enough of him, having been subjected to No Jacket Required and its various singles for way too long. I really don't want to talk about “Anything She Does”. It's just awful, and sounds like it was thrown together in a few minutes, perhaps as a last-minute filler, but I don't think it was. It's loud, it's fast, it's sort of abrasive and it has a kind of latin feel to it, so it is different, but maybe the trouble is that it's too different. It's like something off a Ricky Martin album, not that I'd know what that sounds like. It's salsa, soul, rock and roll, just doesn't work for me, especially the frenetic chorus. Meh. Sounds like trumpets in there again, though it could be synthesised. Oh, and the main melody for the verses is ripped off from “Illegal alien”, just to cap it off. :rolleyes:

That could have been it for me, but then we get “Domino”, one more big epic that actually nods much more to the Genesis of yesteryear than “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” did. With a nice slow jangly guitar and hooting synth it is split into two sections, the first, “In the Glow of the Light”, a slow, moody piece run mostly on dark synth with some powerful percussion and orchestral hits. The whole thing runs for almost eleven minutes, which is something of a joy for old Genesis fans like me, and it really is a standout on the album. There's a nod back to “Undertow” when Collins snarls ”Sheets of double glazing help to keep outside the night” and the first part is quite sombre and bitter, then in the second part, “The Last Domino”, it kicks into life with a galloping beat, somewhat a very distant cousin of the “Home By the Sea/ Second Home By the Sea” model, as well as nods to "Duke's Travels". Banks excels on the keys here, driving the song forward, in both parts, and effectively bridging the two as his morose, crying synth becomes a trumpeting, rocketing one, the whole tempo picking up as it reaches the fourth minute and launches into the second part.

With still ominous but faster synth Banks hammers along, grabbing elements from older songs as he goes, Rutherford painting the edges with superb guitar flourishes, Collins's voice getting more urgent and passionate. The desire for horror/outrage is encapsulated in the lines ”Well you never did see/ Such a terrible thing/ As you seen last night on the TV/ Maybe if we're lucky they'll show it again/ Such a terrible thing to see!” with the very antithesis of “Blood On the Rooftops” from Wind and Wuthering. The beat gets stronger, the rhythm harder and it really starts to rock along in the seventh minute, as the band get into their stride. Why isn't the rest of the album like this?

But it isn't. There's another soppy love ballad to almost close out the album, and though “Throwing it All Away” is a decent song, it's kind of almost an amalgam of “In too deep” and “Taking it all too hard” from the previous album. Not surprisingly at this point, it too was a big hit stateside when released as a single. I wonder what they would have made of “Domino”? :rolleyes: Oh, I see it charted! Even though not released as a single. Interesting. And it's about the war that was raging in Lebanon at the time. Well, that just throws into sharper relief the (sorry) throwaway nature of this song, which is nothing more or less than a simple pop ballad. Weirdly, though written by Rutherford, where I think a guitar solo would have fit, they decide instead to sing the chorus in a round of “Woo-ooh-ooh-ohh”s. We end then on an instrumental, and while it's good it's a little tacked on, with a very industrial/electronic feel to it. “The Brazilian”? Really? Why? Then again, that's a question I could ask about this whole album.

TRACK LISTING

Invisible Touch
Tonight, Tonight, Tonight
Land of Confusion
In Too Deep
Anything She Does
Domino
(i) In the Glow of the Light
(ii) The Last Domino
Throwing it All Away
The Brazilian

At the time, I desperately tried to like this album, because who wants to admit his heroes have failed him, right? But after suffering through Abacab and Genesis I was not in any mood to be forgiving, and to retain me as a fan they would have to have pulled something major out of the hat. They didn't. With the exception of maybe two tracks, this is a pop album, no more and no less, and worse, a badly-disguised Phil Collins solo album. I had already bought No Jacket Required - I didn't need an extension of that.

Luckily for me, Genesis made one final rally before they more or less called it a day, coming back with an album that, while it never quite returned them to the glory days of their progressive rock zenith, at least tried a lot harder than this wannabe-Collins effort. Invisible touch, eh? Touch this. :rolleyes:

Rating: 6.4/10

A year on from the partial success of Nursery Cryme, with their new, now stable lineup working well together and a major tour under their belts, Genesis returned to the studio to cut what would be their fourth album, and one which would finally lift them into the British charts, as well as produce some timeless tracks that would go on to become classics. It would also further develop Peter Gabriel's stage persona, as he wore the infamous red dress and fox mask on the tour to promote the album. As if that wasn't enough, it would have the longest Genesis track ever, one of the few progressive tracks of the time to exceed twenty minutes in length.
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Foxtrot (1972)

Another album that was short on actual tracks, but of which one track would take up an entire side of the original vinyl LP, Foxtrot began to be fleshed out while the band were still on tour, and as Steve Hackett, exhausted by the pressures of being on the road, contemplated leaving the band. It would also see the departure of three producers, as their original one, John Anthony, was dismissed by Charisma Records. Bob Potter, brought in to replace him, was dismissive of their music, having been more used to working with folk sensations Lindisfarne, and Tony Platt did not get on with the band either. Finally, they settled on a combination of Dave Hitchcock producing and John Burns engineering, a team that would last them through their next three albums.

We open on “Watcher of the Skies”, with a deep, sombre, classical sounding mellotron chord, with another coming in behind it, quiet at first then gaining in volume and power as, with the percussion, it blasts open the song and Gabriel begins singing. Moving slightly away from their fantasy/mythology themes of previous albums, this song is a science-fiction tale, the story of a galaxy-travelling entity who comes across Earth after Man has long since passed, and wonders what the creatures who lived here once were like. Its iconic opening still delights crowds whenever Genesis plays, and it is a highly requested song, almost fifty years later. Collins plays some powerful stuff here, driving the tune along, but it can't be denied that it is Tony Banks who breathes life into it and maintains it all through its seven-minute plus run, especially in the closing minutes, when he plays a kind of game of call-and-answer with Collins and Hackett before the whole thing explodes into a massive solo to take the piece to its thundering end.

As in previous albums, a bombastic epic is followed by a simple short song, and again “Timetable” is probably the only song on this album I don't care for. With its medieval lilting melody and its Beatlesesque feel, it's a song longing for simpler times. It's sung well, but it has always come across as the weak song on the album for me, again looking back more to the debut album than anything that has gone since. There's a really nice piano line running through it, and Gabriel is in fine voice, but I'm just waiting for “Get 'em Out By Friday”. I was always of the opinion this song paid respects to the Douglas Adams books of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it seems I am wrong. It's an odd little tale, concerning the forced resettlement of tenants by greedy, unscrupulous landlords. Like “Harold the Barrel” on the previous album, it's another cast effort, with Gabriel taking various parts, the song itself blasting away the softer vestiges remaining as “Timetable” fades into the distance with a blasting keyboard flurry and then a marching, thumping drumbeat from Collins as Gabriel introduces John Pebble, of Styx Enterprises (nice to see the nod to Greek mythology, tying a link back to the closer on the previous album, and also at a stroke painting this company as evil) who needs tenants cleared out of their houses so he can sell them.

“Get 'em out by Friday!” he warns his agent, known as The Winkler. ”You don't get paid till the last one/ Is well on his way!” and the Winkler approaches Mrs. Barrow, who has been living there for all her life, and does not want to move. The music is frenetic, jumping, urgent: Pebble needs those people out, and does not particularly care what measures his agent uses to ensure this comes about. Initially the Winkler uses the tactic of simply raising her rent, making it impossible for her to remain there, then later he offers her a cash incentive to move to a new tower block --- and then Pebble raises the rent again! Some gorgeous twelve-string work here from Hackett, as Mrs Barrow considers her options, reluctant to leave the home she has lived in all her life. Nice flute from Gabriel too.

After a long instrumental section which gets very dreamy and pastoral, time passes and we are now in the year 2012 (remember this was written in 1972) where Genetic Control have decreed that all humans must be reduced in height to four feet, in order that more may be housed, and once again Mrs Barrow is evicted from her home, not meeting the height requirements. Pebble is now Sir John, heading one of the largest construction conglomerates on the planet, and intends to make even more money by buying up all the tower blocks and kicking out the tenants who are too tall. Where will they go? Hey, that's life in the big city, as they say! The song then reprises the opening section before ending with some thumping drumbeats and a sort of angelic arpeggios on the keys as we're advised ”Invest in the Church for your Heaven.”

The legend of King Canute, who tried to prove how mighty he was by commanding the sea to recede, is explored in the cleverly-titled “Can-Utility and the Coastliners”, with a harpsichord opening and a soft vocal, keyboard and flute rising a little as does Gabriel's voice, as Canute decrees ”By our command, waters retreat!/ Show my power, halt at my feet!” An extended instrumental section then builds, trundling along nicely with mellotron and bass, guitar and drums before the mellotron takes over fully, carrying the tune into the final minute, almost echoing parts of “Watcher of the Skies” before guitar joins in and the song gets a little rock and roll. Tweedling keys from Banks brings back the stately grandness of a song about a king, and it heads for the big finish, with a sort of chaotic ending, Gabriel singing a little manically, Collins and Banks blasting out the final notes as it ascends and then stops abruptly.

“Horizons” is the first Genesis instrumental, and a chance for Hackett to show what he can do, and why he would become one of the most respected guitarists of the progressive rock era. It's short, only just over a minute and a half, but beautifully simple and yet intricate, recalling the traditional ballads played by minstrels in medieval times. It's his solo effort, and is the calm before the approaching storm, which breaks slowly but will, if you've not heard it before, take your breath away.

The longest ever Genesis composition, and one of the longest songs even in the ever-indulgent world of prog rock, “Supper's Ready” is a multi-part epic in the grandest tradition of classical symphonies and epic poems, and is split into seven sections. It opens on “Lover's Leap”, which begins with Gabriel's soft retelling of an experience he and his wife once had, an out-of-body thing, where they looked into each other's eyes and suddenly found themselves in other bodies. What were they smoking? I don't know, or even if the story is true or just anecdotal, but it's led on acoustic guitar in a soft, relaxing melody, that somehow has the potential in it to turn into something much darker. And it does. On a twelve-string and piano instrumental it moves into part II, “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man”. It's often pointless to try to figure out Gabriel's lyrics, and I've never understood what this is about, but it drives on a powerful guitar, the soft ambience lost as the song takes off.

”I know a farmer who looks after the farm” Gabriel advises us, ”With water clear he cares for all his harvest.” Indeed. A bubbling keyboard melody from Banks takes the tune, mellotron booming in the background as Gabriel smirks ”Can't you see? He's fooled you all!” Perhaps a sly wink at those who read too much into his lyrics? On a children's chorus of ”We will rock you, rock you little snake/ We will keep you snug and warm” we slide into part III, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men”, the tempo increasing as the characters join a battle with a ”Host of dark-skinned warriors”. Again Banks's synth jumps, dances and whirls all over this piece as battle is joined before it all falls down in part four, “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?” to slow, dreamy, drony synth in the aftermath of battle, and ”Wandering the chaos that battle has left” the characters come across Naricssus, who stares morosely at his reflection in the water, turning into a flower.

A flower? Two words which mean more than nearly anything to Gabriel-era Genesis fans, as they then signal the cosmic shift as the song moves into its fifth part, “Willow Farm”, where things just get silly. Onstage, this also marked the moment where Gabriel would appear dressed as a huge flower. Um. Anyway, riding on a twenties-style melody, the lyric is past ridiculous as Gabriel sings about ”Winston Churchill, dressed in drag/ He used to be a British flag!” It goes on like something out of Alice in Wonderland or Monty Python, before for some reason the characters become seeds in the ground and we move into part six, “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-starring the Delicious Talents of Gabble Ratchett)” (yeah) with a return to the soft, gentle meandering guitar and flute, with lush organ backing it until it ramps up into a real rocker (presumably in time signature 9/8, though I'm no musician) building towards the big conclusion as Judgement Day looms. A bubbling keyboard solo brings us into the apocalypse and returns us to the opening section, as the travellers finally return home, I guess into their own bodies, to witness the return of Jesus Christ in part seven, “As Sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet)” and a beautiful almost orchestral ending with a superb guitar solo to take it out.

TRACK LISTING

Watcher of the Skies
Time Table
Get 'em Out By Friday
Can-Utility and the Coastliners
Horizons
Supper's Ready
I: Lover's leap
II: The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man
III: Itknaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men
IV: How Dare I Be So Beautiful?
V: Willow Farm
VI: Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-starring the Delicious Talents of Gabble Ratchet)
VII: As sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet)

Foxtrot was an important album for Genesis in many ways. Firstly, as mentioned, it provided the band with their first measurable chart position in their homeland, though the single released from it sunk without a trace. Well, what did they expect? Whose bright idea was it to release “Watcher of the Skies” as a single? Surely the shorter “Time table” (even though I don't like it) or even “Horizons” - instrumental singles were nothing new at the time - would have been better choices? But apart from that, it was also the album on which the lineup finally solidified, with Steve Hackett's reservations about playing live and remaining with the band put to rest for now, and it shows a major jump in Gabriel's talent for lyrical mastery, even if often I haven't a clue what he's singing about.

The track “Supper's Ready” is indeed the focal point of the album, but it would not be fair to say that the rest of the songs are filler, not at all. They do play second fiddle to the epic composition of course, and it was this closer itself that would be both the shining jewel in Genesis's crown as they went forward, and the tool of their ultimate downfall, seen as originally evocative, powerful, compelling and exciting as well as ambitious, but in latter years as overblown, pretentious, ridiculous, overlong and pointless, a real symptom of what was seen as the malaise afflicting progressive rock, and which would ultimately bring it down under the weight of its own hubris. But the album marked almost a creative peak for Genesis, and while almost everyone disagrees with me, I feel this is the quintessential Peter Gabriel era album, and the one that was to come, though lauded by so many as their best, somewhat pales in comparison to this masterwork.

Rating: 9.8/10

To give you an idea just how popular Genesis was in the states before the Phil Collins era, I was able to get Foxtrot in the bargain bin just a few years after its release. Count me among those that think this is Genesis' best album. I especially liked Watcher of the Skies, long as it is. I don't think it was until about Lamb Lies Down on Broadway when they began to sound more radio friendly. That's the genius of Foxtrot, I think. They weren't trying to come up with a hit, just make a nice album. that's my take on it anyway.

You're right there. Nursery Cryme was the first Genesis album to get into the charts, and even then I expect few people knew of them. I reckon it's possible you have to wait till Selling England, when "I Know What I Like" became an unlikely hit, before people began remembering the name.

There are some decent tracks on Invisible Touch, but the title track is not one of them. The other single "Land of Confusion" I like better, though I find the lyrics a bit naive and amateurish.

"Domino" does indeed hearken back a little to the classic Genesis sound, though more so on the first part than the second, which gets a bit poppy and shouty towards the end. "Tonight x3" is actually rather good. I am also quite fond of "The Brazilian", a very uncharacteristic instrumental that nevertheless works quite well.

People tend to discuss this new direction of the band as though it was entirely led by Phil Collins, but they forget that he had been a part of the band since Nursery Cryme, and had been the de facto frontman since A Trick of the Tail. Also, from what I know about Tony Banks, "the quiet one", nothing the band did would have happened without at least his tacit approval, if not active support. I think a better explanation is that the band, all three of them, got besotted by observing the stratospheric success of Phil Collins' pop-oriented solo efforts, and could not resist seeing if the same thing would work for the band. And it did, for a while.

Ah, Foxtrot. What can I say about this album that has not already been said, and said better, by others?

Just one thing: I always feel sorry for "Can Utility and the Coastliners", being on the same album as "Supper's Ready". The latter is regarded by many as their finest moment, and I would find it hard to disagree. Yet had "Supper" not been present, I think fans would speak of this album as "Wow, that's the one that has Can-Utility and the Coastliners!". "Can" is musically brilliant, and is even better when you study the lyrics deeply. Poor King Canute is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood figures in history. He was not a deluded egomaniac who thought he could order the waves not to advance; rather, he was demonstrating to his followers the limits of his kingly authority, and how trivial his powers were in comparison with the forces of nature. He was a forward-looking individual who understood some things that still seem to elude certain political leaders of the 21st century.

That is something I did not know, and I pride myself on being a history buff. I must look into that more. If you're right (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I guess I owe poor old Can-Utility an apology.

As for Invisible Touch, it could very well be as you say - Rutherford did go all pop with Mike + the Mechanics (though I'd argue certainly the first, and maybe even the second album in parts was quite prog in a proggy pop way) but I don't see it with Tony. He tried, failed, and decided to go back to his first love, classical. Of all the three driving the new direction, I would still say 90% at least of the blame lies with Collins. Damn him. You can't I guess say he single-handedly turned Genesis from a prog to a pop band, but if he had pursued more the path taken by Gabriel in his solo career, maybe Genesis would not have ended up going as ****e as they did towards the end.

From Wikipedia

All I know is there are two Genesis. The one with Peter Gabriel and the one after he left. It seemed to me as if Collins had taken over the band, though I guess that's a bias with frontmen in general. In any event, prog was dying a bit; even Gabriel's solo material were not of the ten minute variety and I'm guessing Genesis, possibly wanting to make some money, changed with the times.

Having said that, the first Collins fronted album, And Then There Were Three, is pretty fantastic.